Flash vs. SEO

[rogerf265]

I've heard that lots of flash in a web design can actually hurt the site's search engine optimization. Is that true?

[williamc]

Only if the SEO does not know what he is doing.

[mjtaylor]

And I've heard that posting the same question in many forums can get you banned. ;)

[Hamilton]

I've heard that lots of flash in a web design can actually hurt the site's search engine optimization. Is that true?

If it means that there is little or no text content for the crawler to crawl then yes. It can be utilized but not at the expense of the currency of text.

[innominds]

I'm of the opinion that flash combined with unique content keeps the visitor engaged.
But is it really possible to have both of them in a single website?

[Hamilton]

I'm of the opinion that flash combined with unique content keeps the visitor engaged.
But is it really possible to have both of them in a single website?

I guess if you attempt to be moderate with both it is possible - IE. the low end of the 350-550 word text content and just the odd bit of flash added.

[morestar]

Google recently said they've improved their way of indexing flash content (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-feeling-even-better-indexing-of.html).

Learn the way of optimizing your flash content and you should be, to some degree, on your way!

[HTMLBasicTutor]

About two years ago we announced that through a collaboration with Adobe we had significantly improved Google’s capability to index Flash technology based content.
They are using technology Adobe shared with Yahoo! and Google. What about the "other" search bots?


Adobe announced Tuesday that Google and Yahoo are adding search capabilities that will enable users to look inside the content of files encoded in Adobe's Flash file format SWF.

Published: July 1, 2008 on the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4006938800025747900165DE9.html?ref=tech nology)

Providing an HTML version and a Flash version is so circa 2002. Just use Flash for non-important elements and the rest of the page in good old HTML so your pages are search engine friendly, usable and accessible without a whole pile of extra work and tricks.

[morestar]

Just use Flash for non-important elements and the rest of the page in good old HTML so your pages are search engine friendly, usable and accessible without a whole pile of extra work and tricks.

I pretty much tend to go this route too when it comes to deciding to use flash, but there are millions, millions of designers and flash developers that do draw amazing flash movies and wish or need to rank well in the SERPs. At least in that case, Google's getting it covered.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

there are millions, millions of designers and flash developers that do draw amazing flash movies and wish or need to rank well in the SERPs.

I agree, there are some really fabulous Flash movies/sites but those designers and Flash developers tend to forget not everyone has the latest greatest equipment like they do. If you know the target audience has the equipment and internet connection to accommodate those movies/sites, then great but some are doing sites where it is overkill for the type of audience that visits the site.

[williamc]

The main problems we see daily are people using flash for all navigation. Google does read it fairly well, but bing, and of course yahoo now that bing powers their results, are still in the infancy of doing so. The problem seems to be that even tho google is good at reading it, they are still only seeing things like 'home' etc as the anchors of imbedded links. There is the ability however of using html inside of the <object> tags as well as calling the flash applet, so there are actually workarounds.

[Hamilton]

Google recently said they've improved their way of indexing flash content (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-feeling-even-better-indexing-of.html).

Learn the way of optimizing your flash content and you should be, to some degree, on your way!

Got any good informative links to up skilling oneself in this regard?

[Hamilton]

yes,it is ture,so do little flash in your website,if you want to seo

I actually have a situation with a web design client where we're having to balance the downside of having flash on the homepage with the upside and need for the site of a web design to look like it indeed has all of the bells and whistles to come off as high end within the industry and hence more convertible.

[morestar]

Got any good informative links to up skilling oneself in this regard?

No, actually I haven't touched flash in years. I actually taught flash in a class environment about 7 years ago but those days are gone.
I would though check out SWISH (http://www.swishzone.com/) if I were you and if you haven't already. It creates .swf movies like Flash does but much easier.