Flash and SEO

[jgarner]

I know this topic has been beaten a million times, but I have a specific question. With a full Flash site, we are looking into the JS that detects browser type and shows and HTML / Flash site accordingly. Has anyone had any real-world experience with this? I want to give it a shot, but don't want daddy Google to get mad for redirecting if needed. Can anyone show me cases in which this has worked? Or any other ideas about optimizing Flash.

[innominds]

I've never tried it, but there are many references that suggest not to use flash, as flash sites are not SEO-friendly.

[sem4u]

Why not create an HTML version as well for spiders and visitors who don't like flash.

[stymiee]

When the site owner decided to use flash as their website's format, they effective said, "search engines rankings are not as important as presentation".

The problems with Flash include:

1) It's a one page site. How many one page sites do you know that rank well?

2) You lose the power of semantic markup. No HTML = no clues for the search engines as to the relevancy of the content.

3) Expanding on point 2, you don't have any anchor text since you don't have any internal links. That just kills you in Google.

4) There isn't a whole lot of proof that the search engines can read flash as well as HTML.

You have only one available tool for trying to SEO the site and its effect is minimal. Put alternative content between the <object> tags. This has the same effect as the <noscript> tags for JavaScript.

If you are making an all flash site, you just have to hope you can be successful in a massive incoming link campaign. Otherwise you have to target marginally competitive keywords or niche keywords as you virtually don't have a prayer of ranking for anything even remotely competitive.

Your only option is to create a second version of the site so it can be read by search engines, users with accessibility issues, and users who don't have flash. Of course you've doubled your development costs by doing this as you have two websites to maintain now.

[andyf]

That’s true, Flash sites are not liked by Google, they don’t index such sites easily so webmaster of flash sites have to work hard for getting into google index.

if you are building a full flash sites, you can do one thing. you move all your content out of your Flash movie and into an XML file or keep it in a database. This makes it much easier to allow Google to index this content by using progressive enhancement.
This way your content get indexed by google though your site uses flash.

[jgarner]

Your only option is to create a second version of the site so it can be read by search engines, users with accessibility issues, and users who don't have flash. Of course you've doubled your development costs by doing this as you have two websites to maintain now.

That's exactly what I'm looking at. I wanted to know if anyone has had experience with this, and/or examples of success with this method. I have spent so long advising against Flash, and I'm turning a lot of customers away. I don't want to anymore.

[stymiee]

if you are building a full flash sites, you can do one thing. you move all your content out of your Flash movie and into an XML file or keep it in a database. This makes it much easier to allow Google to index this content by using progressive enhancement.
This way your content get indexed by google though your site uses flash.
This won't help you at all for two reasons:

1) XML is useless unless you link to the file otherwise Google won't find it. But why would you link to an XML file with all of your data on your website? You wouldn't and so the data still can't be found and read by Google.

Even worse, if your XML file was indexed, your XML file would come up in searches, not your website. The result is useless information for visitors.

2) Databases are not crawled by search engines. You have to get the data from the database with a server side programming language and then create HTML from it. In other words, you have to build a website. This takes you right back to what I said, you have to build and maintain two websites.

[JimmiJames]

Your only option is to create a second version of the site so it can be read by search engines, users with accessibility issues, and users who don't have flash. Of course you've doubled your development costs by doing this as you have two websites to maintain now.

That's exactly what I'm looking at. I wanted to know if anyone has had experience with this, and/or examples of success with this method. I have spent so long advising against Flash, and I'm turning a lot of customers away. I don't want to anymore.

Why are you turning customers away? because of your lack of flash?

Anyway, having 2 versions of the same site is a little 2001...

Today, sites are made with a combination of various technologies. You should only use flash for images, banners or demo/presentations. All the rest should be HTML/CSS.

[jgarner]

Your only option is to create a second version of the site so it can be read by search engines, users with accessibility issues, and users who don't have flash. Of course you've doubled your development costs by doing this as you have two websites to maintain now.

That's exactly what I'm looking at. I wanted to know if anyone has had experience with this, and/or examples of success with this method. I have spent so long advising against Flash, and I'm turning a lot of customers away. I don't want to anymore.

Why are you turning customers away? because of your lack of flash?

Anyway, having 2 versions of the same site is a little 2001...

Today, sites are made with a combination of various technologies. You should only use flash for images, banners or demo/presentations. All the rest should be HTML/CSS.

I agree. I am turning customers away because I don't SEO Flash sites. I very diligently try to educate the customer on why not and why it just doesn't play nice in the SE world, but in the end these people are paying a lot of money for Flash sites, and realize later the need for visitors and ranking and such. So, I get a call/email, look at the site, and call the customer with the bad news. They don't normally want to get a new site or change the "wonderful" site they have, and I end up letting them go.