If You Want To Rank Well In The Search Engines, Here’s Why You’ve Got To Ditch The Flash Site…
You’ve probably run across several web designers who insist on using Flash to create websites. Most have good intentions, but are just not fully aware of the pitfalls that come along with relying too heavily on Flash web design. Others are probably just really bad web designers altogether. Enough said about that.
But one thing is true. Regardless of what you’ve heard, using Flash on the web has some really great applications and some that are, well, just not very good at all.
For example, a couple of good possible uses might include:
- Using Flash for video. Flash-based video has more or less become the iron-clad standard for streaming video on the web. It works very well.
- Using Flash for image libraries or other “widgets” or “apps.” Flash works nicely as a sub-component in many photo sharing slash portfolio types of website applications.
That said, it’s still probably best to use Flash components on your website as sparingly as possible. And it’s all for very good reason. In fact, Google themselves has even laid forth the shortcomings of using Flash on websites. They spell it out very concisely and clearly here on their Webmaster Central Blog:
As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.
Now when talking about ranking well in the search engines, it’s hard to argue that Google’s position on Flash isn’t pretty much definitive. The more you use Flash as a component on a website, the less the search engines are even able to recognize it—let alone effectively rank it. Search spiders are getting better at understanding Flash, but there are still severe repercussions that can be completely avoided in entirety by choosing to use a more universal web design platform.
In Summary
Even though many web designers insist on using Flash-based websites, it’s just not a good idea if you plan on attracting organic traffic from the search engines.
- Flash effectively prevents search engine spiders from recognizing and understanding your site correctly.
- Without being able to understand your website, the search engines are not able to rank or list it appropriately within their search indexes.
- Flash can also be non-compatible with certain web browsers and mobile browsers (meaning visitors using these browsers will see a blank space or error message instead of the site as intended).
Don’t become overly afraid of using a small Flash component or two on your site. But just don’t fall into the trap of using it for the entire site…unless you’re trying to prevent visitors.
Tags: Flash, search engines, SEO, Web Design
