Is it necessary to use $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] for my website created with Adobe Flash from Google point of view?? Please advise me.

So I gather you're using agent detection to serve Google a HTML version of your site so it can be spidered more effectively?

There's no harm in that, it's not black-hat if the content is the same, it would be deemed a little dodgy if you stuffed the HTML version with loads of keywords etc, but no, a HTML version of the Flash page is totally acceptable.

Hi.

I'm no expert on flash indexing but I've seen that google claims to be able to read almost any text-content and all links within a swf file if it's embedded propperly. Even if you embed your flash with SWFOBJECT 2 (depending on javascript) the bot should not consider your alternative content as duplicate but simply index the flash when possible and fall back to the alternative content if the flashfile can't be crawled. However there seems to be some problems with external content loaded from the flash file. But user agent detecting seems to me like overkill.

 

I can't post links yet but you can go to googles webmaster tools under "Images and video" and read about googles ability to crawl Flash.

List of file types that Google can read can be found here

 

NB: HTML (.htm, .html, other file extensions) includes external CSS and Javascript files. and is smart enough to notice if you are up to no good

 

Google also operates a headless browser that renders the page inside a server for taking screenshots. Officially they do not read text written on images as of yet but they do have that capability see this article whether they add this feature to the Googlebot is of course anybody's guess.