Flash websites & SEO

This has been going on for years now. The amount of times we have had this discussion with clients has been amazing. Can my flash site achieve the same ranknings as a normal HTML website?

The answer is YES !!! and No …..

Well still a bit more no than yes (at the moment)

Lets explore.

Google and Yahoo have been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files in conjunction with Adobe who provide the Adobe Flash Player technology to both companies ( poor Microsoft – gee the other kids just don’t like playing with him do they).

Adobe have also stated that content owners and developers do not have to do anything to the millions of deployed SWF files to make them more searchable. Hmmmm… so does that mean that they will all just start ranking now?

Well Google have made these comments regarding flash that help designers understand a bit more about the technology and how goolge sees it.

“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.”

So it seems that the old flash sites may still have issues and not be index right away. If your flash was built using text elements as well as images then the text can be indexed, if the flash was developed where all elements are images then it will not work as yet.

There are some other areas that have been pointed out by other SEO sites globally. Essentially the message is the same …. act with caution here. Flash sites are not cheap and essentially what you are doing is hoping that the flash designer understands what is needed by google and others to pull info out of the flash movie to give it an index.

Also  – I have never seen a flash file with the hireachal qualities that the search engines base so much of their algorythims on. I am talking about heding tags (H1 – h2 etc) or anchor, title tags etc. It is just the bare basics that can really help a standard HTML site, so unless a flash site is given exceptions to the rules – I wouldn’t be recommending any of our clients to go full flash just yet.