Flash and search optimization (SEO) - some guidelines
This is still a hot topic these days, despite what we already know:
Spiders don’t really crawl Flash thoroughly.
Flash is seen by many as the indicator of a professional website. Basically, if the site is nice, looks cool and has fancy navigation options - if the company invested lots of money in their site - they must be a good company. Hopefully most people are starting to clue into the fact that this just isn’t so.
In fact, many businesses online rely on a fancy website to cover up for the fact that they are just a coupe of guys looking to make some money online. Fancy site means a real company, and they use this to their advantage.
But, for those who are serious about business online, the debate over to Flash or not to Flash breaks down along different lines.
Do you use Flash to offer a better user experience? Is it used to showcase a particular product or service in a unique way?
It’s easy to get carried away and end up with a killer website built entirely in Flash. The downside being they don’t tend to perform well in the search world. Like most things, your mileage may vary, as I’m sure there are some success stories of sites that are built with Flash doing very well indeed.
By and large, though, most people tend to ask how to optimize a Flash website to do better in organic search rankings, so the trend is as we understand it - Flash sites struggle. And for good reason. Google’s Webmaster Central blog recently had an article on this topic and it’s worth a read - here’s a snippet:
“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.”
The bottom line remains the same - don’t bury critical information inside Flash files. Things like navigation, sitemap data and actual content needs to be seen by the spiders so they can not only see links, but determine context. Without this holistic view, the engines are flying blind. Help them, and yourself, at the same time.
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