Don't use Flash unless you have to

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Nov 24, 2007

Sorry if this seems obvious.

I have just rewritten a website for City Lodge, an Auckland accommodation NZ website.

The new site looks almost exactly like the old site, except it's done in HTML instead of flash.

When evaluating the job, I saw a nicely designed 5 page flash website, which had a few rollover effects and a splash page. The splash page had to go as a matter of course, but rollovers can easily be replicated using Javascript. Except with Javascript, things degrade a whole lot better, and search engines can still see the content they need to see.

The indexing of the site is just yuck.

XHTML / CSS

By converting the whole site to plain XHTML / CSS, and using Javascript for rollovers, I think we have gone a long way towards getting this site indexed properly. We also added some on-page SEO, and will be doing some links in due course, and perhaps this site might start to rank again.

Flash based websites

Flash based sites are great in the right context - Hell Pizza is still my favourite example of a flash based site that has shit on-page SEO but still manages to rank top of Google NZ for "pizza" (presumeably due to links). We can forgive any SEO mistakes by the fact that the website is just so great to use, and fits so nicely into the whole Hell brand. Despite being several years old, this site is still several notches above any NZ competitor.

You couldn't get that level of interactivity and animation using Javascript.

For everyone else - if you don't need the level of animation that flash gives you, consider using Javascript to get the effects you need. Using libraries such as jQuery or script.aculo.us you can add some fairly decent eye candy to your site and still be spider-friendly.

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Tags: on page seo flash seo

Comments

Ryan - Jan 9, 2008

Hi there,

I personally prefer to work with flash rather than html, and have just set up my own flash website design business. Not knowing really anything about SEO I have just read about how flash is mostly unreadable by search engines, even though Google 'claims' they can index it.

My question is what if I have an html page (which I put all my marketing energy into) that is optimised for search engines and have the links point back to my actual flash page? The main negative to this is just that users will have to click twice (once on the html page and once on the flash page) to get to the page they wish. Look at my link for an example.

Is this a good alternative to throwing away flash sites completely or is it still going to be hard to get SE attention? Im also thinking about article marketing, possibly using www.articlemarketer.com to get quality backlinks. Good idea?

Harvey - Jan 9, 2008

One of the biggest issues with flash sites is that there is only one HTML page. There is only so much SEO you can do to a single page site, when you are competing with sites having 100+ pages of text rich content.

I think the best approach is to have several entry points into your flash application. So when someone visits about.html the flash application is loaded with the about page showing.

The HTML page itself contains the same text as what the flash app is displaying, but hidden using CSS. Using hidden content for accessibility purposes is fine, providing the text is the same as what the user sees.

To keep things maintainable, I would recommend a shared data source - store the body content in a database or text file, which is readable by both the html website (using PHP/ASP) and the flash app (using actionscript). Maintaining a flash copy and a separate html copy of the same content is not fun if the content needs to be changed regularly.

Flash websites can be made search engine friendly, but it takes a fairly serious amount of effort to do so.

Goran Giertz - Website Marketing - Feb 2, 2008

Hi Ryan

About 6 years ago we were only designing flash websites as they really look great.

Over the past few years we have been on a drive to get clients to not use flash as they are demanding more business.

I do realise that this is your business model. We now outsource business to flash designers here in South Africa.

Flash is great for certain elements on a website; banners, demo's, walk thoughts etc. And there is lots of demand.

But SEO sites well.. that's just a lot extra work for nothing.

Wishing you a exSEOllent 2008