Using Flash on your website can improve the look and feel of the site but it may cause problems for the search engines. 

The search engines see Flash content much as they see an image - with little text content that can be indexed.   

If the Flash is just used in a banner or as a way of displaying a moving image then there should be no problems.  However if the whole site is developed using Flash it will not usually get good rankings in the search engines results.  In particular:

• although search engines are beginning to be able to extract text from Flash, it is unlikely that a Flash site will be seen to be content rich.
• all the content of a Flash animation belongs to the same page so a site developed in Flash may be seen as having as little as one page. The more pages a site has the more opportunities it has to be indexed by the search engines.
• Links in Flash are not followed. If the only route to a page on the site is through a Flash based menu then pages on the site may not be found by the search engine and hence not indexed.

In summary, our advice on using Flash is:

• use Flash to display images and animations that complement the main content of the site. 
• if the Flash contains important text then repeat that text in an HTML page. 
• don’t use Flash for navigation.
• every page on the site should be an HTML page which may or may not use Flash to illustrate the content of the page. 
• avoid using one Flash animation to display several topics. 

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.