Use Flash sparingly on your site

Flash brings real interactivity and media to websites. Unfortunately, it brings headaches for SEO since search engines can’t see it.

This topic surfaces repeatedly in the SEO community, but it’s still surprising to see how companies will invest $100,000 in a Flash website with the express intention of improving their search engine ranking. There are some really innovative Flash sites out there demonstrating real creativity, but while they will often be more interactive and, well, ‘Flash’ than traditional HTML/CSS sites, they will always rank lower in SERPs.

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

How GoogleBot sees a Flash site

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:

  • 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.
  • Great designers often don’t know much about SEO (sorry, but it’s true). In the book’s example, screen-captured from an unnamed 100% Flash site, the TITLE attribute is the default value “Intro”, and it’s missing a META DESCRIPTION. A search engine has no chance of understanding that this site is for a national bar chain specializing in jazz and martinis.

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.

In the book, we discuss other problems with Flash, together with issues with frames and Ajax implementation.