resolved.

If you're just using Flash to do rollovers I'd say that's a big waste of resources. You could use other programs, like ImageReady, to make the job of simple rollovers a lot easier. Plus you wouldn't have to worry about SE ready Flash or not.

Here's a good example of a complex rollover you would need Flash for:

http://www.tallinn.info

Actually if you clicked on it you would notice it is an accordion menu- it is not "just" a rollover. I would have done plain normal coded rollover with images if thats all it was.
I am just curious about the impact of having a flash navigation in terms of SEO or if the spiders were able to get beyond the navigation and spider through the other links of the site map on bottom of page or front page links.

Search engine spiders cannot read Flash at all. If you want rollovers like yours use Javascript. The only problem with using a flash navigation is that the spider won't read any links within flash.

I actually read a recent article that states that javascript is harder for spiders to get through than flash, but this depends on the spider, your code, your site's link popularity and so much more. Take from it what you will. Here is the link:

Optimizing a Javascript Site for Search Engines from SEO Chat.

Actually it's not so much if you use a reference javascript file (.js) as oppose to having all your script on the actual page. Spiders will favor links towards the top of the code without having to search through a bunch of functions to get the info it wants.

Use this code in your tags to reference a javascript file:


Then create a text file (or use Dreamweaver) with
on the first line and dump all your scripts below it, omitting all the tags. You have now removed 10-20 lines of code that a spider will need to search through.

You have one other option, which is technically better and faster than Javascript and that is CSS Rollovers. Check out http://www.w3schools.com for an extensive CSS reference and live tutorials on multiple CSS functions.

Now that i think about it, for SEO use, CSS rollovers may be your best bet. But i wouldn't reference them to a .css file, use the CSS on your page.

Also, i wanted to point out that a Flash button wouldn't have a link at all in the HTML script. The links in the button are all contained within actionscript in the .swf file, so technically Java would be better because it would contain an actual link, while Flash would not.