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Getting Search Engines to read Flash Content

Ok, so I lied. While Google supposedly now does index Flash content, what this article is really about is a quick a dirty way to get search engines to index your pages which contain Flash without having to display that content to the user in the HTML.

Basically this technique relies on swfobject (http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/). One thing swfobject does in dynamic mode is allows you to specify alternative content in a div for non flash users which gets switched out via JavaScript once the page loads:

    <script type="text/javascript">
    swfobject.embedSWF("myContent.swf", "myContent", "300", "120", "9.0.0");
    </script>

    <div id="myContent">
      <p>Alternative content</p>
    </div>

So basically you can duplicate the content which goes into the Flash app in the Alternative content section. Search engine spiders index HTML, but don't run JavaScript so are none the wiser that the user is actually going to see a Flash app.

The best case scenario is when the content in the Flash app is dynamic so you can easily duplicate it in the HTML. Static text needs to be manually copied. Most app related text will be instructional in any case and not really suited for search engines.
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