The situation is actually much better than that... here's an overview of
search engines and SWF:
http://www.markme.com/jd/archives/002065.cfm

Note that this is nearly a year old, though, and search engines have
changed details since then... one recent trend is towards "clusters" of
sites and how they inter-relate... you can pick up details of the latest
Google changes, for instance, with a websearch term of "brandy florida
pagerank".

jd




--
John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco CA
Search technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/
Soapbox column: http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/jd_forum/
Daily technical diary: http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd
Offlist mail is trapped by spam-filters... best here, thanks!

I am very happy with the new accessibility features and love to provide text
descriptions of my flash movies because I feel it is the right thing to do. I
was wonderign though from a business perspective....could I use the new
accessibility features to make conent accessible to search engines. Currently I
don't do all flash websites because search engines can't read flash text. Many
web designers I know feel the same way. I try to use flash and html text to be
accessible and achieve good ranking in search engines. Does anyone know how to
use the new features in 2004 to make a document that search engine could
read....macromedia would be smart to do this because search engien optimization
is a growing frield....huge......field.....and most everyone won't use flash
because search engine exclude it....can't macromedia work with msn, yahoo, and
google, to fix this problem...it would boost their business and free designers
to design.......what an idea...anyhow I would love some input...
[L=see how a search engine views your site with this great site....it will
amaze you]http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html[/L]

I have an all Flash site but I take the index.html file that is create
when when I publish the index.fla file and then edit it and ad
metatags in the header for keywords/phrases.

Having said that, I was looking through my site stats one day and foun
that someone had actually searched my site by text that was in th
Flash document. I didn't know it would do that


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my main concern is the text.....the link you provided say google can Rank on
text in a SWF: Can and does (?) Google is the most used serach engine...and
yahoo and msn are rolling out their engines as we speak....I want these engines
to read my text in my flash document and rank my page....I know I can have off
page related text links to boost ranking but text on the page is the most
important factor...I think fast is the only one to do this....if I am wrong
please tell me because I would love to use all flash and save time and
badwidth,,,,,but I really need spiderable text for those major searchengine
bots....any help would be very much appreciated.

what search engine bot was it.....? could you post a link to the site...? Also,
google does not read metta tags anymore for ranking purposes....but the new
yahoo does....but only keyword and discriptions....

[quoted text, click to view]

Maybe I'm not reading this as intended, but are you asking "How can I
get a page found if the only incoming link is from a SWF file?" If so,
then I'd still recommend keeping a spiderable text version so that even
the most naive search engines can find that document too.

Hmm, or is it more like "To what degree do various search engines assign
pagerank based on page text?" From what I understand, there's more and
more deprecation of this method of ranking relevancy by the various
search engines... the recent articles on Google's "Florida" and "Brandy"
changes, for instance, point more towards authority-clustering as an
evaluative technique. If you're interested in search-engine optimization
techniques then there's ongoing research about this whole field... it's
bigger than just SWF!

jd






--
John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco CA
Search technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/
Soapbox column: http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/jd_forum/
Daily technical diary: http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd
Offlist mail is trapped by spam-filters... best here, thanks!