If your real estate website rings, flashes, lights up and buzzes you probably have Macromedia Flash on it and you need to get rid of it or at least optimize it for search engines.  Flash is the single technology that separates the men from the boys in web development and SEO. While Flash is a great technology for the novice we designer, Flash is not W3C compliant.  To a search engine it is completely invisible. Why? Simple, search engines only read text and cannot index the contents inside a Flash file, so, you can consider the text inside a Flash file completely lost to a search engine. It is very difficult to near impossible to boost rankings for a Flash only site.  That being said, if you still feel compelled to use this technology, there are some ugly workarounds to optimize Flash sites. NOTE: an optimized Flash site is still like being blind and having Halle Berry for a wife…

Mary’s Required Flash Rant

Needless to say, I hate Flash. I hate everything about it. It annoys me and I consider Flash developers (meaning those who develop entire sites or navigation menus on sites using Flash) an inferior breed of web designer.  I’m sure that will cause one or two Flash “Developers” to spin themselves into a Flash-ified tizzy but so what.  OK, enough of the rant portion of this post.

Why am I on a quest to wipe Flash off the face of the web?

Because I received a call from another ActiveRainer, the ever so sweet Dawn from AllABoutVirtualTours. She asked me to take a look at her website from an SEO standpoint.  (And yes, before anyone thinks I am busting on poor Dawn, I have her permission to use her name and site as an example in this article.)  Dawn has a site developed using Macromedia Flash.  You know the kind of site that plays music when you open it in the browser and has lots of animation before you get to the meat of the content.  The kind of site that is, well, annoyingly unindexable (like this new word?) by search engines.  For example: Take AllABoutVirtualTours and run a “site:allaboutvirtualtours.com” on it in Google.  Only 2 pages appear in the index.  Why only 2 pages when she clearly has many more?  Simple.  Her entire menu is in Flash and because the engines can’t read the content of the Flash file, they can’t follow the links to index the pages on the rest of the site. 

Why Search Engines Hate Flash Sites?

Flash just like the rest of your web candy media types is simply too complex for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a Flash movie directly. Spiders prefer plain text. Spiders index filenames but not the contents inside. Flash movies use a proprietary binary format called (.swf) and since its not text, spiders, obviously, cannot read the contents, at least not without a whole bunch of assistance. And even with the proverbial “seeing eye dog” for Flash, spiders cannot crawl and index all your Flash content. Before you ask: this is true for all search engines not just Google. There might be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time being, search engines are really united – they hate it but they index portions of it if optimized.

Why not to use Flash:

1. Flash cannot be indexed by search engines

2. Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they generally tend to skip them.

3. Flash movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Mbit connection or better is still not the standard one.

What Not to Use Flash For?

You can use Flash for some things. I do, but for the most part, avoid it for things you need indexed like menus, navigation and primary content. Now, sometimes Flash movies are worth the SEO efforts. But as a general rule, keep Flash movies to a minimum. In this case less, is definitely more.

The general rule of Flash is: Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it. What this actually means is that if you are talking about something important- use real searchable text (HTML/XHTML) that you can SEO. Only use Flash to add further detail or give a visual representation of the story.

Full Flash Sites

Now, for all those that insist on telling the whole story in Flash. Your developer has committed a crime against all of Internet humanity! Look for forgiveness from above because the rest of us real developers will not forgive you. The fact is, a full Flash site is not searchable and it won’t receive decent rankings by the engines. For the most part Flash sites have abysmal page ranks in the 0-2 range.

Menus/Navigation

Never ever use Flash for navigation or menus on a website. This applies not only to the starting page, where once it was fashionable to splash a gorgeous Flash movie with some external linksl. Although it is a more common mistake to use images and/or JavaScript for navigation, Flash banners and movies must not be used to lead users from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to build site navigation.

Got Flash on your site?  Here’s what you tell your developer to do to fix it.

• Workarounds for Optimizing Flash Sites

NOTE: the following workarounds are not be considered a solution but rather a cheap and dirty fix that have some value for SEO.

MetaData

Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash tools allow you to easily add metadata such as keywords, descriptions and titles to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.

Alternative pages

Always provide html pages as alternatives to represent your Flash pages so you do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well will see the html only pages.

Flash Search Engine SDK

This is a must use technique for SEO and Flash. SDK is the most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool named swf2html. This tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document.

That being said, you still need to have a look at the extracted text to correct it, if necessary. Most commonly, the order in which the text and links are arranged in your SDK will be strange so you may need to restructure it in order so that the keyword-rich content, title and headings are at the beginning of the page.

Also, you need to check for duplicated content. Font color can also be an issue. If the font color of the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will need to change the color of the font.

NOTE: Google and the other search engines may not use Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file.

Got Flash?  Get SE-Flash.com

www.se-flash.com

This tool visually shows your Flash files look like to search engines. This tool will even check the contents of the extracted text in your Flash Search Engine SDK.