One of the advantages of Flash is the ability to load symbols once and reuse them an unlimited amount of times without any additional loading. In theory these symbols could take the form of letter characters and be use in place of text, you can also do whole words in this manner.

As you can infer if the crawler can only read your important words then it is more likely to assume that’s what your page is about. Of course a page with only 5 or 6 words on it is not going to look like a good search result to display but without knowing what weight the search engines are assigning to what it can read from Flash it may give higher importance to what little it can see.

If you have a longer amount of text on your Flash site then remember that there are words that are already discounted from most indexer’s calculations, things like ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘of’, and if you manage to have a couple of hundred words comprising of your keywords and the words it already discounts, then it may assign even greater importance to those keywords and that your page is an appropriate result to display.

Alternatively it may think it’s spam. More testing will be required to find out.

The other option is to assign text to paths, where you can group the letters/words and turn them into a movie clip.

Be aware though that this is probably a bit of a grey area. Although you’re not showing the users anything the spiders can’t see the spiders can’t make sense of what they are seeing and you’re presenting a deliberately obscured version especially for them.

You’ve been warned.

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