Avoid Flash if you want search engine rankings
Flash is really popular for website design because it allows you to do loads of pretty things that you just can’t do with standard HTML. EConsultancy have a list of top 10 cool flash websites that’s worth checking out if you want to see what they can do.
They really catch the eye and this shows that they can even be viral since people are discussing them based on how cool they are. But where Flash absolutely kills your website is when Google comes to ranking you.
Last year, Google announced that they can read Flash and just this week they’ve announced that they can now read external files loaded by Flash. What that says to me is that while they CAN read Flash, they don’t do a great job of it. If they announce that they can read Flash but then have to follow up with announcements that they can read flash a bit more than they used to, then common sense dictates that there’s plenty of stuff in Flash that they still CAN’T read.
This means that you’re still more likely to have better search engine success if you just stick to HTML.
I would suggest a compromise – keep all of the SEO special bits in HTML, so that includes your titles, headings, important body text and navigation. When you want to do the pretty stuff, use Flash, but keep all of the important bits out of the Flash file. That way, Google will find what it needs to find by reading the HTML (something that it’s super-good at) and your visitors will still be blown away by the great animations and graphics capabilities of Flash.
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Comments
I have to disagree, having a site in an incomprehensible format would be a crazy thing to do. You’re purely relying on the anchor text to determine what you rank for and this, obviously, will have a massive effect on your rankings.
You’re welcome to make your sites in Flash and desperately hope that people link to you with the right anchor text and that Google somehow manages to discover every page in your website. I’ll stick with HTML and use flash only when I need some pretty animations.
Sorry – Being Flash, AJAX or even PDF has not much effect on your SE ranking. I have done extensive research on this and urge you to look at some real results.
http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2009/01/flash-search-engine-optimization.html
Fact: Having a site in a completely incomprehensible binary format (not Flash because Google can read Flash content) and having highly SERP ranked pages pointing at you is often better than having a site Google can read (HTML for example) and no one links to it.