A little flash is ok…
This is an important distinction. A couple Flash movies, widgets, or applications shouldn’t negatively influence your Web site’s SEO potential to a high degree, particularly if you follow some best practices. But having your entire site built in Flash? That stands to have a large, discernable impact on your search engine rankings even if you follow best practices.
Yes, all-Flash sites look pretty and garner awards. But do they enable a site to be easily found in the search engines? Simply put: No.
Some reasons given for avoiding all-Flash sites are as follows:
- All pages on an all-Flash site have the same URL, so how is Google supposed to index all of the internal pages on your site if they all have the same “location”? How is another site supposed to link to an internal page if the URL will simply bring them to the home page?
- Even though some search engines can now access text within SWF files, the Flash output can often be much more difficult for them to read and understand than the HTML text would be.
- Search engine spiders only read the text embedded within the Flash, not the tags on your site. That means your keyword-rich meta-data, like page titles and descriptions, won’t be relevant to the search engines on an all-Flash Web site.
- Semantic and paragraph mark-ups are not enabled in Flash, so you can’t let the search engines know relative importance of various sections on a page through the traditional methods of header tags and the like.
- Flash sites tend to get less natural inbound links than HTML-based sites. Maybe it’s because they’re harder to find, or maybe because they are frowned upon by the tech-savvy crowd who tend to share links.
