As a sales executive I am often asked my opinion about using Flash as a means to develop a web site. There are cases in which flash is the only way to properly display a products capability or accurately portray a message but, as you will see from reading the following quote from a member of the Google search quality team, Mark Berghausen explains why flash has it’s limitations when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and should be used sparingly or in conjunction with an HTML based web site, not as a single entity. Again, this is from a member of the Google Search Quality Team…..
As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.
So what’s an honest web designer to do? The only hard and fast rule is to show Googlebot the exact same thing as your users. If you don’t, your site risks appearing suspicious to our search algorithms.
In closing I will say this, I love Flash! I love the animation and I love the awesome things that flash developers have done but in terms of business, I think it’s safe to say that if your site is entirely developed in Flash, you are hurting your Search Engine Optimization severely, balance is the key.
Good points. The days of Flash web sites that are 100% flash are gone, if it is the main web site for a business. It can still be used well for microsites, however, when you need to highlight a product with some visual punch. For instance, check out http://www.chevrolet.com/performance. That is a microsite that Chevy did for their new concept Camaro that is in the new movie “Transformers”. That is a great example of how a small flash site can exist within a larger site, without hurting the overall site’s search engine ranking.
Besides microsites, Flash is also good for three other areas in web design; video, design elements, and banners. YouTube and other sites have proven that video on the web has come into its prime. Flash video can be embedded into ANY web site now, and we are adding more and more videos to our web designs. This simply was not as elegant before Flash video technology emerged. And we have all seen the small video banners that really grab your attention on major web site portals.
Where Flash is used badly, is in web site intros, web site navigations, and scalable home pages. All three are really bad uses of Flash that will turn off visitors and hurt your search engine ranking. Used properly, Flash is a great technology for adding depth to your web site and making it more interactive. But you have to be REALLY careful how you plan it out in your designs so that you don’t hurt your web sites position in search engines, or hurt the usability and accessiblity of your web site.
It is interesting that at one time it was important to make your web site as “flashy” as possible to get and keep someone’s attention, and now that may actually hurt being able to find the site.
Temple,
Note that “Flash” is a technology for putting animations and video in a web site, and “flashy” might be used to describe how much is going on in a web site graphically. It is interesting that you mention this because we sometimes notice that sites that are graphic-intensive sometimes have less gross sales than sites that are more plain and easy to navigate. This is especially true with ecommerce web sites more than any other type of web site.
What we are talking about here in this article is the fact that Google can’t “read” all of the contents of Flash movies, so when you make a site that is using Flash for all of the content, there is no way that you would come up high in Google. So again, “Flashy” designs and “Adobe Flash” technology are two different things.
Hope that helps.