Flash sites are, in general, some of the worst performing sites on the web. They usually have a pitiful amount of search traffic and out of the visitors that do manage to find the site 50% of them will decide that they would rather leave again than bother to watch the intro and click though into the main site.
Adobe has today announced a new plugin that will allow Google and Yahoo to start indexing Flash content and help them make sense of the millions of Flash documents out there. You can get more information via Matt, TechCrunch and Search Engine Land.
The issue for me is that optimising Flash content has never been difficult and yet Flash developers still don’t usually bother. All you need to do to optimise Flash is to make sure people without Flash can still navigate the pages and read the content. That isn’t SEO it’s basic usability.
If Flash developers haven’t bothered with this in the past then it is unlikely their applications will be optimised well enough for the new method of indexing to make much difference.
It’s one thing for Google to be able to index a page and find out what it’s about but totally another for them to want to rank a particular page highly.
Flash sites normally have just one page with a whole load of content while normal sites have a unique page for each bit of content they want to rank highly. That’s why Flash sites get far less traffic and unless this changes the situation won’t change.
If design agencies see that Google can now index Flash the number of Flash sites will increase and when they fail to get any search traffic SEO’s can step in and optimise them. That’s why this is good news for the SEO industry.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Ugh. Grammar Nazi here.. you mean “SEOs” not “SEO’s”.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-typo-guys-0521may21,0,701362.story
Long time lurker and first time commenter!
It’ll probably take some education to make Flash web designers optimise their sites properly so I guess it’s a good thing that Google and Adobe are doing this. But I can just see the search results now:
Results 1-10000 for “some search terms”
Skip Intro
Skip Intro
Skip Intro
Hi Patrick,
I’ve commented similar on Matt blog, but what’s your opinion.
Depending on how deep Google can crawl SWF, then is this not a potential gold mine for spammers who could embedd hidden links within the SWF file and then go ahead with an online advertising campaign. With these links embedded within the SWF adverts, they could potentially gain thousands of crawlable links!
Google has been saying it can index Flash sites for a while – were they lying?
Deep linking is not available, nor are dynamic URLs – meaning you can’t bookmark pages inside the .swf, nor can Google link to a page inside the .swf. Also – the key to SEO is being able to use Google Analytics to track where the visitor is going, how long they stay, etc. This doesn’t allow that data to be tracked either.
I have conquered the Flash/SEO Mountain – you can see it in action at:
http://www.davincimediaworks.com
The back button in the browser works, each page is bookmark-able, Google can deep link to any page, and Google Analytics tracks each page perfectly.
Find me on Twitter
I’m sure that if the Flash files can be hacked the spammers can inject links. If they can hack the Flash files they can probably hack other parts of the site too though, unless Flash files are easier to hack?
More comments from Patrick AltoftYipeeeee… finally, design meets search. thank you Patrick
What we have found is that as long as the site is not totally Flash based, then there are no issues. The issues aride when there is not text rich content for the engines to find.
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