Flash and SEO Myths

Many webpages nowadays are embellished with Flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology facilitates, in a very easy manner, to place small animated, vector-based drawings into your webpages.

Captivating as these flash animations could be they do have a huge effect on the way the website is seen by the search engines. Because of the constraints of search engine optimization for flash sites conversions and profitability of the website will likely be affected.

What Are Flash Animations?

Flash files have the extension .fla. As an example a file could be named banner.fla where the .fla represents the flash format extention. The file will then need to be exported into a Shockwave Format (extension .swf) for use on the web page.

Any text which you use in the animation very likely won't be indexed by the search engine since they almost never give attention to these formats. In spite of this there are search engines (Google, dir.com etc) that will read the text in these animations. This means that any site or webpage which is developed entirely in Flash will be invisible to the search engines that index only text content in html format.

Why Do Some Webmasters Use Flash

It's not a secret for anyone that search engines don't really like websites which are constructed using Flash exclusively. These sites hardly ever contain enough relevant text to allow a good indexing. Above that, not all spiders can read the content of a .swf file. Flash is used however every so often for mini-sites or for campaign sites.

Flash is interesting for at least two reasons:

The impact of animation is maximized with flash which increases the web's interactive and aesthetic environment.

Flash combines well with other engineering like php, mysql, xml, video, sound etc. This makes it possible to include flash in a totally dynamic website.

Pros

More content can be included in a smaller sized space without excessive compromise of the layout.

Flash makes it easier to feature slide shows and movies into a website.

Flash is perfect for producing banners, ads and flash videos.

For creating visual impact and pulling the eye to specific points of interest on a website Flash is the tool of preference.

Cons

Sites making use of flash may take time to load also it will increase bandwidth consumption.

The majority of search engines do not like and don't index Flash.

You could be at the mercy of the Flash developers - if you use 3rd party Flash developers, they may code the project so that you won't be capable of making any kind of changes and you'll have to pay them for modifications

The "Back" button is usually disabled for flash websites and also Google's AdWords won't approve pages which have the Back button disabled. So, watch out for this should you decide to advertise your web site by using a PPC campaign.

Flash may disrupt the visitor's experience on the website. For instance, endless movies and sounds without volume control might drive some site visitors away.

Splash Pages don't favor your visibility - they lack the text which contains the keywords seen as pertinent to your services / products.

Optimizing Flash for the so-demanding search engines is not always easy. Your time and effort that must be done and the amount of energy that must be allocated to SEO for Flash are much more than for the optimization of a HTML site.

When you need more information about flash components or you want to get some flash components, don't forget to read my previous articles.