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The need to have your site stand out on the internet is paramount – for many businesses this is a make or break issue. Their web presence – and any advert promoting their site – must be as eye-catching as possible. For this reason Flash has become very popular, it is a multimedia platform that has flexible support for images, animation, sound and video coupled with its powerful scripting language, ActionScript. This flexibility has been a huge attraction for any site wishing to have complete control over the user’s experience. Its widely used internet browser plug-in has also meant that site owners could be confident that visitors would arrive pre-enabled to view Flash content.

One traditional problem with flash based content has been its inability to be indexed by search engines. Because the structure of a flash file has never been the ‘open book’ that text based html pages have been, the flash file has traditionally been ignored by the automated ‘crawling’ process that search engines use to find and evaluate pages.

This impasse for Flash files has had some level of breakthrough. In 2008 Google’s webmaster blog posted an article that revealed that Google was now indexing Flash files with greater accuracy. Google can now evaluate the text elements of the Flash file, it can also interact with buttons to allow it to navigate the file as a user would.

There are limitations to this process though. Google’s evaluation of Flash files is still not able to determine some non-text based elements, so if your Flash file uses lots of vector based drawing to construct its content then Google will still not interpret it.

Up until recently Google also did not index any resources loaded externally by the Flash file. For example, if your Flash file loaded another Flash file, text, or other HTML element, Google would not be able to index and associate those files with the original. This situation has now changed officially, the Google Webmaster Blog posted in June 2009 saying that indexing of external resources was now possible.

The construction of the website is still imperative, web design still holds pivotal role in a sites success. Online marketing exercises such as SEO will also allow a site to thrive, presenting a website at its very best to the search engines.

The popularity of a webpage with search engines are not solely based on content though. Even without the relatively new abilities of search engines to see inside Flash files, a website could still become popular via its ‘strength’ built by external linking. I.e. A page that is linked to by other pages for the same topics will still have some strength regardless of the ‘accessibility’ of its content is to a search engine.