Home - Is Flash helping or harming your SEO?

100% Flash websites don't rank well in search engines.

The text and images of a Flash object are stored as a binary format so the animation you see in the final rendered version doesn't exist as 'readable' text in the containing HTML or FLV files. While Google and Adobe have both been getting better at making Flash movies more searchable, it's still the case that Flash sites rank poorly by comparison for 2 key reasons:

1. Google's sophistication of looking beyond keywords to understand context is lost in metadata used to describe the movie content. A 100% Flash site may contain dozens of page with visible text content, but this will be summarized as a handful of keywords at the file level. In many cases, designers don't include the metadata at all.

2. Great designers often don't know much about SEO (sorry, but it's true). In many instances of 100% Flash websites, the containing index.html page has either missing or generic TITLE and META DESCRIPTION tags, giving search engines no chance of understanding the content.

At its most basic level, SEO is largely a text-driven business and robots can't read images and Flash well. Most Flash sites don't integrate well with Google Analytics (which is possible, but rarely done), making it difficult to collect metrics on where users are clicking and what pages within the site are the most popular. It's also not possible to bookmark individual pages, so the entry point into the site is always the same.

Other problems with Flash

There are some cases where Flash elements on a page will improve the user experience and won't harm search engine rankings. Typically, these examples tend to be small and not central to the navigation or functionality of the page itself (such as interactive flight booking components on travel sites). Aside from the SEO problems from overusing Flash, there are myriad other issues:

• There's no guarantee that users have Flash installed - Flash is a plug-in not natively included with the majority of browsers. Relying on the presence of any plug-in is not a good strategy.
• It frequently results in much slower loading times, and therefore higher bounce rates. Flash movies can be large, and many users don't want to wait for a multi-megabyte movie to load.
• Many mobile devices don't support Flash (including the Apple iPhone and iPad).
• Initial design is more expensive and maintenance is usually very painful: it takes more time to code Flash than HTML/CSS, so typically costs more.
• It's difficult to make dynamic sites in Flash, compared with non-Flash, so Flash sites tend to be static. Also, RSS subscribers can't see the Flash content.
• It's easy to get carried away with overly-complicated animations and effects and completely lose the user. Most users want a fast unobtrusive way to reach your content rather than great design.

Excerpt from "Ranking #1: 50 Essential Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results"