You’re talking there about a pretty complex & more than likely very expensive process, and all to get flash content indexed on Alta Vista, which is – and was back then, only responsible for a pretty small slice of the search engine traffic pie.

Getting flash content indexed on search engines, for most web masters, hasn’t been possible until recently – apart from with creating a html version of the page too.

Go to google webmasters, Google themselves put out information towards the end of 2006 stating that they cannot index flash.

It’s only really quite recently that real headway has been made here, but still flash files are harder in terms of SEO than html sites – most flash sites I come across are not experiencing search engine success.

I’m not ruling out flash – I’m saying that, at the moment I still wouldn’t completely design a site in flash unless there was some very strong reason to do so.

Using flash elements in design is fine – but I still do not feel it’s a good idea to completely design a site in flash.

What you have to remember also, as well as the negatives in terms of SEO, is that if you design a site in flash, a percentage of people won’t have the correct flash player installed to see the site, this is a negative that you won’t ever overcome completely – so you need to be sure that there is some equivalent benefit from using flash that couldn’t be replicated in HTML – otherwise why bother?

Cheers

Kev

Basically what they did, was they embedded the flash site on top of a normal HTML site, with the help of a little javascript. They also pulled the same dynamic content into both versions, so if you had the Flash Player installed, you got the Flash version, if else, you got the HTML version. AltaVista couldn’t “see” what was embedded by the javascript, and thus indexed it like a normal HTML-site. I think it was a very clever solution.

They even did some url-rewriting stuff, so that if you came into the site from a search result in AV, you got sent to the correct state in the flash version.

IMHO, the flash version also had a much more compelling user interface than the HTML version, giving the visitor a much better experience.

Today, we can see the same techniques used on more and more flash sites, so I wouldn’t rule them out just yet.