Flash, spiders, and searchbots… oh my!
Take a seat on pappy’s knee while I smoke by corn cob pipe and tell you about the olden days of web design… way back in aught-seven.
Most people generally love Flash. It looks cool if used properly and it can add some zip and zing to your site, hey… it’s “flashy” afterall.
But from an SEO standpoint, in the past Flash has left much to be desired. Search engines like Google had a difficult time indexing the text content from Flash files since it was sort of “trapped” inside the file itself and not readily available in the HTML page’s code where searchbots and indexing spiders like to poke around.
In the past, legitimate work arounds have been few and far between. This made things extremely difficult for businesses who wanted to create a rich user experience with a Flash home page or navigation menu. So, these businesses often sacrificed rankings for the user experience, since they could rarely have both while still following all of the guidelines set forth by the search engines.
Recently, Google announced that they can now index “textual content in SWF files of all kinds” and “extract URLs embeded in Flash.” This is great news for web designers and owners of Flash websites. In the past, we would approach the use of Flash carefully, usually using it only for a visual punch, so we may be more inclined to pull it out of our design tool belt more often. Google’s advancements are no panacea solution however. There is still no substitute for a web page’s natural keyword-rich text content when it comes to playing nice with Google’s indexing spiders.
In truth, Google has actually been able to hamfistedly index text content and follow links inside Flash for years. Even with the recent improvements, SEO with Flash isn’t perfect, though there are many techniques and practices which can help significantly. Here’s an article which outlines many key points to consider when considering search engine optimization with Flash.
Again, Flash is a great tool when used properly and thankfully it is becoming more and more friendly to search engines… so we’ll certainly continue to use it for visual impact when appropriate.
We love it when everyone learns to play nice.
