I just discovered that someone on a Web Analytics discussion group misconstrued the recent Google announcement of better Flash search engine crawling support to mean it is now good to use Flash when developing web sites.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While Google’s move is welcome support for all the legacy Flash websites still in circulation, companies shouldn’t generally be deploying new sites made wholly using Flash.
What Google has announced is significant improvements to their ability to extract information, specifically text and links, from Flash objects. Despite what many are trying to read into this, Google already crawled and extracted this information from Flash only sites – this is not exactly new.
What is new is that hit or miss crawling and discovery is probably just mediocre instead of bad. But mediocre is not good nor is it great. Before site architects and designers rush off to develop Flash only websites, they should still consider SEO and non SEO issues with Flash:
- Flash only websites are missing the full semantic richness various html tags provide Search Engines for the indexing and ranking process. Flash is a poor substitute for html.
- Flash only websites don’t usually provide unique URLs for different site “pages”, necessary for bookmarking, sharing links, inbound linking, detailed web analytics tracking….
- Flash sites are almost always slower to load – the browser has to load the flash player (or worse, ask that it be installed), then load the entire site or section of site contained in the flash object.
A more detailed description of the problems inherent in Flash can be found in my earlier article on why Flash is bad for the web.
I’ve seen web designers worth their salt perform wonders with standard html and css. Flash, except in rare cases, no thanks. And no, Microsoft’s Silverlight is no better; it isn’t even cross-platform compatible, despite misleading Microsoft statements to the contrary (no official Linux support; the third party solution, Moonlight, is out of date, thus unusable). In any case, Microsoft’s track record of supporting non-Windows platforms includes non other then their primary Internet tool, Internet Explorer, which is no longer supported on Unix nor on the Mac.
If you really care about your web presence, use the very best web standards: html and css. Or at least proceed at your own informed risk!
Similar Posts:
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- 8 reasons to avoid Flash (or Silverlight) like the plague when designing a website
- Simon Says… or is it Google Says?
- Web Text as Images: SEO & other problems overcome with @font-face
- Search engine Ask.com no longer crawling the web. Weakly powered by Google?
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Sean Carlos is a web marketing consultant & teacher, assisting companies with their Search (SEO + PPC = SEM), Social Media & Digital Media Measurement strategies. Sean first worked with text indexing in 1990 in a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then he worked for Hewlett-Packard Consulting and later as IT Manager of a real estate website before founding Antezeta in 2006. Sean is an 
Yes there is no easy way to optimize flash
Well…my agency’s website is flash. We have none of the problems you describe.
1) All information on it is 100% visible to search engines. Flash embedding replaces HTML code underneath, and search engines read the HTML. We even have our google webmaster tools account that proves this, we fetch our pages as the googlebot and it sees all of our info just fine.
2) Flash doesn’t load slower. In fact it’s more capable of using less Kb and less server requests. Your statement is the equivalent of saying “cars with painted flames go faster”. No they don’t…faster cars have a higher percentage of owners that paint flames on their car…but painted flames themselves have no bearing on the car’s speed. And likewise the sites chosen to be made in flash tend to be promotional microsites, photography sites, etc that simply need more image based content to show…but flash itself does not make for any larger of a site.
3) We have full analytics support. Not only for page browsing, but even for things like events of people using the contact form, viewing portfolio images, etc. Flash’s AS3 is a very capable language that actually expands how much you can track using analytics, not diminishes it.
4) We have fully crawl-able linking. Flash doesn’t “hurt” anything about SEO or semantics, it just doesn’t do much to help it. But flash replaces a div of HTML to show…so you put the alternate content in that div. It’s really not that hard, I could teach you to make fully seo friendly flash in about 10 minutes.
5) This last part:
“the browser has to load the flash player (or worse, ask that it be installed), then load the entire site or section of site contained in the flash object.”
That’s quite misleading. The browser doesn’t have to load any player: flash is a pre-installed plugin that almost all browsers already have, and the ones that don’t just see the alternate HTML underneath if you did your job right. The only thing that has to load is a single swf format file (less server requests) that is a streamable format (less wait time before you see content) and is compiled bytecode (considerably smaller than ASCII type files that have to load for the same layout compexities and data in HTML/CSS/JS).
The lesson to be learned here is that Flash is what you make it become. Flash is only bad if you make bad Flash. Be picky about who makes your flash sites.