Flash & Google

[CharacterPlanet]

I don't think Flash should be avoided simply for fear of seo, but it should be coupled with text on the page. Even if the flash isn't readable the text above or below/around it certainly is. If not text then the spiders rely on the meta data.

[loki]

Originally Posted by TWD-Tony

I'm currently working on a client's site which is totally flash (moving over to HTML) and I was shocked at how well the client did actually rank for their current flash site...

i haven't heard that too often!

i'm guessing their rankings could be explained by the link text of inbound links?

that, or your client's site is in a sector that isn't very competitive?

[Find Accountants]

That's an interesting comment Loki.

I too feel that the rankings may be down to good in bound links, which once again shows the importance of having relevant, anchor text rich, in bound links.

It's be interesting to know the web address of this flash site CharacterPlanet.

[JedWylie]

There's an interesting article on the official Google BlogSpot but I can't put any link in my posts yet so if you type in "google flash indexing" into Google, it's the top link. (I realise it's a year old but it's the only official Google response I could find.)

[TWD-Tony]

I think it also depends on how the page with flash is constructed - if you just plonk a flash .flv in a HTML page then you are going to be struggling to rank - you can however add code to the HTML to provide content for both bots and browsers that don't have the ability to read flash / have flash installed...

[Frantic Fish]

is it advisable to put a series of marketing messages in a flash header anymore. Presumably google would see every page as starting with the same content

No, they won't. The flash banner/header is a separate file and seen as a separate page by Google. You can block these in robots.txt to stop them being indexed and make the content effectively non-existent. Google still then can index the url of the Flash file but you can use the URL removal tool in GWT to get rid of it.

[vixar]

Originally Posted by bumfluff

Just to throw another perspective out there, Flash on sites usually isn't very accessible. Google's crawlers strike me as similar to a person using a screen reader in terms of content they can deal with. I think that's quite good because it means that the more accessible a site is, the better the chance Google will show it some love too.

I completely agree with you

[ExtraPairofHands]

It is important to consider how the Flash file itself is constructed.

What a human sees as 'text' may be stored inside the Flash file as a JPEG (unreadable by Google), a 'shape' (unreadable by Google) or plain/HTML text (readable by Google). It therefore doesn't necessarily follow that all Flash text is equal in terms of SEO.

Also, Google might decide to only index Flash files on pages with a PR greater than 1 (for example), only index uncompressed Flash files, only index n Flash files per website etc.



James

[loki]

Flash has been around since ´96 but was never intended to be a platform for an entire website. During the dotcom boom graphic designers found they could create an entire website using flash and went to town selling their services. In those days we didn't know too much about SEO so it wasn't an issue, but then as the www became more popular and competitive, the problem of optimising an entire flash website became a thorny issue.

Website owners were astonished and distraught to find that their beautiful, expensive flash sites couldn't compete with a simple HTML site. Graphic designers weren't interested in the commercial side of things, and people like me got tens of calls from very pissed off website owners asking for a solution.

Flash is great for some things; tutorials, if you're selling Playstations to teenagers and need high impact graphics, but only as an embedded file.

GG announced a year or so ago they could finally parse Flash, (the fact they took over 10 years to do this gives a clue as to the degree of difficulty of doing so correctly) but read the fine print, it was in limited circumstances at the best of times.

Flash has NO place as a platform for a commercial website in a competitive sector, and most likely never will.

My 2 cents.

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