Flash affecting rankings

[brandonre]

I have just incorporated flash into my site, and I was wondering if having 2 flash objects on a page will effect the keyword optimization. Especially where I have them both at the top of my page. I noticed most sites really only have 1 flash object per page, please correct me if I'm wrong in thinking that to much flash code will have an effect.

[Calculator]

I wouldn't worry about it. It's no different than having an image up there and you have plenty of text on the page to be crawled.

[BrandonSternfield]

There is a way to put text 'behind' the flash. Basically, you make the flash, then you put all that content into words. This way people without flash still get content, and thus so do the spiders.

I honestly forget how, but some other thread here has it If not, I'm sure google does.

[Mouse]

I would not worry about it since your Flash Objects do not really contain much content besides your contact information.

If you did want to embed your Flash over some content then you would use sfwObject(). Just do a simple search on Google for that or Flash SEO, and it will walk you through th process.

[Jay6]

The reason flash hurts people is because the search engines can't see it. If your home page is one big flash object that means you have a blank page as your home page. This doesn't happen much anymore but it's not good.

The worst thing to do is make your navigation in flash. This makes it impossible for the spiders to get to all your other pages and index them. It's unfortunate because I've seen some cool looking flash navigation.

Flash is great for replacing a simple non linking graphic or image with something that really catches the eye.

[MikeDammann]

Google is now ranking a lot of flash sites, as long as you have incoming links and text on the other pages, it shouldn't make a difference.

[Jay6]

There are some simple things you can do to help get the spiders to crawl the site like put links at the bottom in text. See this example

http://www.jacksononhigh.com

After bottom links were added it went from 1 page index and not ranking to most pages indexed and fair amount of organic traffic.