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Flash and Search Engines; Do they Mix?
By Gary Thomas | August 21, 2007
Broadband is penetrating the market and companies are trying to get the advantages provided fancy Flash displays, I do agree with you! Your site looks awesome! But what is the point if I can’t find it anywhere on the engines. Flash along with JavaScripts Sites, are by far the hardest sites to get ranked. Search Engine state they can read the files. I still think they struggle in parsing it. You ask: “How can I get around this?”
Well I came across some quick tips to get around these limitations, thanks to Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy over at SEO Chat (Optimize Your Flash Site for Search Engines).
A better way to incorporate Flash, if indeed your client must have it, is to first create an HTML site, and then use Flash movies in place of images, buttons, and banners. These areas are usually of little importance to a search engine anyway, so it seems fine to do it this way. In which case, optimizing this type of site is no different than optimizing a plain ole HTML site. This is my top recommendation for Flash.
I would have to agree. Don’t make the whole site flash. You can make your banner and navigation flash. However, I highly recommend that you bring your text outside of the flash movie whenever possible. Spiders will have an easier time crawling contenton the HTML page than in a Flash movie.
You should give your visitors the option to advance past the intro on their own, without the nasty redirect, which a lot of Flash intros use to send the visitor to the actual content of the site. We know the search engine spiders do not like redirects. So let your visitor take control over their experience.
This isn’t web 1.0 any more. That was great back then, but it is a pain in the you-know-what. Especially when you don’t have a “skip into” link. The Engines can get lost in this intro as well. So be very careful if you decide to go this route.
The Macromedia Search Engine SDK is designed for search engine application teams. What this means to you, the SEO, is an insider’s view to what the search engines actually see. Do your homework: simply to know which search engines utilize the SDK, and optimize the site for those specific search engines.
This is key! Macromedia tools are getting smarter and smarter every year. This tool allows the engine to easily read the links and text from the flash files. It takes the test and links and converts them into an html file.
These are just some of the tips when working with a Flash Site. The synopsis is this; don’t make you site all Flash. While this can be very appealing to your audiences, it can have a negative impact with engines. So unless, you are Nike or some other well known brand you had better plan for the long haul with a full Flash site. Your rankings won’t come in a flash!
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August 22nd, 2007 at 10:55 am
Good insights Gary. If companies want full-fledge Flash, they suffer the consequences. Poor choices lead to horrible things in the end.