Adobe Flash is a favourite technology for many web developers. Some developers make entire websites from Adobe Flash. Flash is very versatile and can enhance the attractiveness and the user experience of a website. Flash in itself is not harmful to a website’s Google search results. Google announced improvements to its search algorithm to enable it to read textual content embedded within SWF files. This was long awaited by Flash developers because previously Flash files were totally unreadable by Google web crawler and therefore harmed a website’s SEO chances.
Now that Google has integrated the later Adobe Flash technology into their algorithm, this is less of an issue, but take note that the announcement in 2008 was of an improvement and does not necessarily address all issues with readability of Flash websites and Google’s ability to index them properly. The truth is Google can still only partially read the text embedded in Flash files.
Here are the major reasons that Flash websites will have problems with Google:
- Flash only websites cannot tell search engine crawlers the amount of useful information that html tags can.
- Flash only websites don’t generally provide unique URLs for each page on the site. Unique URLs are needed for sharing links, website traffic analytics and bookmarking to name a few.
- Flash sites are almost always slower to load – the browser has to load the flash player (or worse, ask that it be installed), then load the entire site or section of site contained in the flash object. Google recently announced that website loading speed is considered as part of their ranking algorithm.
- Apple’s iPad, soon to be released this month in Australia, does not support Flash. Apple is pushing Flash aside in favour of HTML5, CSS and Javascript. Whether this is technologically driven, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs says, or business driven, as Adobe says, websites written in Flash will be able to be viewed on new Apple devices.
I am sure you’ve come across websites that have a fancy flash movie intro sequence that animates the company logo or some other song and dance that is designed to impress the visitor and build the company brand. These flash intro pages might impress some people, I personally find them a waste of time and a barrier to getting to the actual website to find the information I’m looking for. There is always the “skip intro” button that moves you on to the main website, but these intro pages are not only ineffective for marketing your business in most cases, they also inhibit the rest of your website from being properly indexed in the search engines. From an SEO point of view, flash intro pages are a big no no; and from an Internet marketing point of view, they need to be extremely clever to have any real positive effect on purchasing decisions.
By no means am I saying that Adobe Flash shouldn’t be used at all when developing websites. Not at all. Adobe Flash is still a very useful development tool for all sorts of web based applications, from banners to forms, low bandwidth movies and web based games. The point here is that websites that are completely developed with flash or overloaded with it are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to competing on the search engines when compared to websites that have a healthy amount of HTML code with easily readable titles and text.
Flash is basically useful to the user, but not so useful to search engines. If you have a website that is flash heavy, or you’re not sure if it is structured properly to give your business the best chances of being found in the search engines, the best course of action is to get an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) consultant to perform an SEO audit to determine its search engine friendliness. This way you can find out what needs to be done to get better positions in Google and the other major search engines. In many cases, the website structure and content can be optimised to accomplish this goal. If your website is completely built with flash, you may need a website redesign in order have much chance of being ranked well.
If your website has a lot of flash and you want to know what it will take to get high positions in Google and the other major search engines, contact AWD and speak to an SEO professional today.
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