Google isn’t a big fan of Flasher’s – and we’re not talking about seedy looking guys in Trench coats, but rather websites that are designed using Flash.

The problem is that Flash is designed to look appealing to human visitors but since search bots like Google, Yahoo! and MSN don’t have eyes, the effect is useless to them. Ok, it’s not entirely useless as Google is able to read some Flash files and can even extract the text-links contained within them, but it still can’t decipher text or content that’s embedded in a Flash file. This means that even though the content may end-up being indexed due to off-site factors (such as inbound links), it often won’t rank as well as it could because of the lack of spiderable on-site content.

Google’s official blog offers some good advice on some of the better uses of flash and although Google is against cloaking (the process of presenting website content differently to users from that of search bots), a representative states that as long as the intent is legitimate, placing text behind an animation can be acceptable. You can read more about this in this Google Groups thread.

If you would rather not place text behind animations, there are other tools available that can be of assistance.

SWFObject allows you to write a page in HTML and then using javascript, replace the HTML with the Flash SWF. This not only allows users without Flash will see the HTML content, it also means Google will be able to properly crawl your page. You can also combine this with SWFAddress (which is an SWFObject script) allowing you to deep-link inside your Flash SWF.

So with Google giving the thumbs-up to putting appropriate text behind Flash animations or even better-yet SWFObject and SWFAddress – there’s no reason why you can’t gain great rankings with a Flash site.

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