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Flash & SEO

Oil and Water - Flash and SEO

In the right hands, Flash can make impressive things happen on the web that are difficult or impossible to have happen any other way. There is, however, one concern that will undoubtedly crop up when designing a website that will contain large amounts of Flash, or may even be entirely composed of it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Flash have long been thought to be two entities that could never coexist. With the proper techniques and careful planning it is possible to create beautiful Flash websites that rise to the top of search result pages.

Outside of the clever workarounds and coding tricks that I’ve dug up on the web which I’ll discuss below, there have been some interesting advancements in the search engines themselves that are lessening the SEO burden on Flash developers. As of March 2007, Google, Yahoo, and Live all have the ability to at least index Flash pages. [1] Additionally, Google has really taken the next step by adding the capability to actually extract text and links from Flash SWF files. Apparently, Google introduced this ability a couple of years ago, but strangely it seemed to go mostly unnoticed in the SEO community. Other search engines will surely add similar features, if they haven’t already started to. What this boils down to is that Google is not completely blind when it stumbles across a Flash file on the web.

Macromedia (excuse me, Adobe) offers the Flash Search SDK which includes a program called swf2html. It is unknown if Google uses this technology or something proprietary, but this software allows Flash developers to get a rough idea of how a search engine robot sees a SWF. To see this in action without downloading the application, load up Google and search for "nasa" filetype:swf As you can see in the search results, Google has indeed indexed the static text content and links within the SWF files.

As I mentioned above, there are many techniques to create Flash rich sites that still maintain a high level of search engine visibility. During the Flashforward Conference in 2005, workshop leader Gregory Cox mentioned two tried and true methods that are still relevant today. [2] The most common is creating a static HTML only version in conjunction with its Flash counterpart. The second is to embed the Flash files within multiple static pages. This overcomes one of the issues of creating an entire website in Flash, where the search engine sees only one page which hurts ranking.

The final Flash SEO technique I came across while reading an article on deconcept. The article does a better job of describing the actual mechanics than I could, so I won't go into nuts and bolts here. The article is called A Modern Approach to Flash SEO. The piece showcases a method to progressively add Flash to a site using a JavaScript object called FlashObject. The page is first designed without Flash in mind. The FlashObject script is then added which is able to replace the regular content (which the search engines can easily index!) with Flash once it determines the user has JavaScript and the correct version of Flash installed. The nice part of this method is that the search engine will skip the Flash content and index the HTML.

All of these methods have their place, but deciding which one(s) make the most sense for your application might be tricky. If your flash is purely decorative or contains only light content, it might make sense to let the search engines do their thing, seeing how Google can peek into SWFs. If your Flash contains the majority of the site’s critical content, it would probably be wise to employ one or some combination of the methods described here to keep your content visible to the search robots and keep your website at the top of the stack.

References

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Dan Rouse is the Art Director at Commareus, a company that specializes in tableless CSS and tasteful Flash. Dan is a graduate of the Graphic Design Program at The University of Massachusetts Lowell. His email is: dan@commareus.com

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