Flash & SEO Optimisation

You may have read my last post on Adobe flash content being optimised. I basically discussed how Adobe and Google could crawl .swf content and index it. Today I would like to address how HTML based source is always better than flash based applications from an SEO point of view.

Flash and HTML are fundamentally different in numerous ways, Flash applications may be crawled to extract URLs or even snippets of text but this doesn?t make flash applications more SEO friendly. For all webmasters/ developers flash should still be used sparingly. Below are some outstanding issues.

Content & URLs
This is a similar issue as AJAX based pages. A flash application may include a number of extra frames and movies within movies which may seem like separate web pages. In fact the application runs on one page for the entire website. Inner content within flash cannot be linked either because the application is based on real time (view the starting point of the application).

Text animations
Google can index phrases from the output of the .swf file but flash is still quite limited. Text within flash is not easy to read like HTML where tags such as <p> or <h1> help crawlers find the appropriate data. Text can be transitioned from the left or right, virtually any direction. Can Google read this information in order? What happens when strings are separated into single characters for animation effects, does Google read this as a full string?

Page rank
Optimising the inner pages of flash is difficult. Flash usually links to other flash pages within the .swf? making crawling these inner pages difficult. This would also result in poor PageRank, even though the main page would have a PageRank associated with it.

HTML optimisation Vs FLASH
How do we optimise Flash? The SEO basics are removed because Search Engine optimisers cannot simply include HTML based tags such as alt, bold/strong or anchor text. So how can crawlers find appropriate content?

Search engine crawlers are not quite smart enough to crawl flash effectively. Google has done a brilliant job at crawling web based content. It?s basically a matter of time until Google can crawl flash effectively.

S.Whiston SEO Programmer

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