Macromedia Flash and search engine indexing

[eamonn]

A site i am designing has a flash menu system. can search engine robots read those links and index them?

[mattsiegman]

no

[lokki]

actually, depending on your publish settings, Flash will embed links in the HTML file it produces. However it will not include links that are loaded at runtime, but that's not too much of a concern because the loaded files can be made accessible to the spiders.

The main problem is that your site itself is not searchable in the traditional way, unless you use some fancy redirects and JavaScript/Actionscript trickery to manipulate the Flash movie.

Another thing you can do is edit the published HTML file to include links explicitly, or have a non-Flash version of your site that can be crawled. This is nearly always a good idea, anyway...