Can Flash and Silverlight be Search Friendly?

Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight can create some awe inspiring animated web sites. Awe inspiring won't put money in the bank though and so if you have a Flash or Sivlerlight based site then most likely the search engines have no idea what your website is about. Currently about 95% of browsers are Flash ready and 25% are Silverlight ready.

There are some new technologies coming out that help search engines read these types of files. Venda Inc. can take a flash file and convert it to an XML file so it can be indexed for the search engines. Once a file is converted then changes can be made directly to the XML file. This in turn makes the file searchable on the major indexes.

Back in mid 2008 Google also announced that they had begun crawling and indexing Flash based websites. Through a flash reader that was created by Adobe Google's algorithm can read Flash files. While the technology isn't perfect it is a start. Google has stated that Googlebot can now extract textual content and links so Google can better crawl, index, and rank a website.

The technology of reading Flash files will get better over time and hopefully at some point reading a Flash or Silverlight file will be the same as reading text based file.