Are Flash Websites a Viable Development Option For SEO?

August 16th, 2009 by admin

For years now flash websites have been the bane of my life as an SEO professional. I don’t know how many times I have had to explain to a website owner or designer that the amazing, innovative flash website they built is completely useless for natural search engine results.

Back in 2002 Google tried to tell us they actually could index flash, but it turned out to mean nothing more thanthey could see the SWF file but not read the content and rank it in a way they did for HTML pages.

Again last year, Google made noise in the market that the issues were now solved, flash could be indexed, flash was good at last. But this turned out to be a half truth and not all the problems were solved as flash sites rarely if ever appeared for competitive terms without underlaying them with an HTML version. But looking back, it seems that Google were onto something last year when they decided to start making noise again. They have been working hard to solve some of the problems and I think I can finally confidently say flash can be optimized for organic search engine results.

Information from the Google Webmaster Blog confirms what Google can do:

- Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.

- Discover links within Flash files.

- Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file. (On 18 June this year Google added external resource loading to their Flash indexing capabilities).

- Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWF Object and SWF Object2.

-Index sites scripted with AS1, AS2 & AS3, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. To expand on this list a little more, at the SMX Advancedconference this year Google confirmed the following:

- Links within flash files can be followed and do pass link juice just like regular links. This means links within flash files pass all the same value and juice that a normal web page link does.

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Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.

Discover links within Flash files.

Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file. (On 18 June this year Google added external resource loading to their Flash indexing capabilities).

Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.

Index sites scripted with AS1, AS2 & AS3, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. To expand on this list a little more, at the SMX Advancedconference this year Google confirmed the following:

Links within flash files can be followed and do pass link juice just like regular links. This means links within flash files pass all the same value and juice that a normal web page link does.

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