March 24th, 2010 by Susie

Flash is a piece of software commonly used to place animated or visually attention grabbing content on websites. It requires an add-on to the web browser to be properly integrated (this bit is important) and it’s quite common across the internet both on personal and commercial websites. The other key point is that Flash is a graphics environment, not a textual one.

The chance that something called Adobe Flash Player is on your computer right now is very high. Without it or something similar, your web browser will get into difficulties and be unable to fully load content from a significant number of websites. An error message will come up asking you to download a Flash player and retry.

At first glance, the idea of having little movies, animations, and pictures and bits of text jumping around your website seems like a good search engine optimization strategy, right? It makes your web page look exciting and gives you lots more design scope. But almost every SEO resource will tell you to avoid building pages completely in Flash. There are a few reasons why.

First, Flash is used- or at least perceived to be used- to add a little pizzazz to websites without much to offer. If something has to flash on and off constantly to get your attention, you’re probably not looking at a well designed website. It’s also going to get annoying very quickly if you are trying to read the content. SEO is all about internet reputation management, so even if your Flash animations are relevant, useful, and fun, be careful and keep the flash content to a banner or two rather than a significant portion of the page.

You’ll notice that we host videos on this site- they’re a great feature and not something to avoid- but code them and place them carefully. It is paramount that any animations on your site are voluntary. Here, you click on the video if you want to watch it. Subjecting visitors to the same animation clip every time they enter will win you no friends and won’t add any benefit to your SEO efforts.

The other reason is more technical. Until recently, Google couldn’t extract much information from Flash objects. Because the whole philosophy of Flash is based on graphics and not text that can be read, processed, and ‘understood’ by a computer, it’s opaque to text-based analysis. Google are pretty clever, of course, and they can now squeeze some information out of some Flash objects, but the process is problematic and inelegant- best avoided. Flash navigation brings a whole new set of issues with it. The take home message is that the web crawlers that collect the information search engines use to create rankings and results pages don’t like Flash objects.  We have some flash on our site, but it is vastly outnumbered by text-rich content to help search engines discover what it is about more easily.

There are also compatibility issues which less related to SEO but very related to your customers. We mentioned earlier that Flash objects require special software to load and play. The problem is, the Flash players and their standards are different under Windows, Linux, Mac OS and all the rest. One of the key points about the web is interoperability- you should be able to explore a website fully no matter which platform you’re running at the time.  At the current time, although a few mobile devices have some basic flash (flash lite) support, an ever increasing number of users are using mobile phones and other comparable devices to access and browse the internet, and they can’t see flash at all. By building a website in a language that discounts these potential customers, you are no only limiting the success of any search engine optimisation efforts, but limiting your audience too.

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2 Responses to “Why Is Using Flash Bad For SEO?”

1. Dillinger says:

   June 30, 2010 at 12:45 pm

   http://www.flashmoto.com/blog/project-news/seo-guide-optimize-your-flash-cms-website/

   and

   http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-maile-ohye.shtml

   Google developer interview.

   “Eric Enge: So, will a link embedded in Flash pass PageRank?

   Maile Ohye: Yes, it functions as a regular link.”
2. Backyard Bargain says:

   September 9, 2010 at 12:52 pm

   flash websites take long time to load and as per seo perspective its a bad effect on google search engine ranking.