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 optimised for organic search engine results.
Information from the Google Webmaster Blog confirmswhat 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 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.
Another important confirmation from Google:
- Links within flash that are like a bookmark, denoted by the hash symbol, are not added into the Google index, so this is not a method you should use to try and get multiple URLs indexed from your flash file website.
What needs to be understood is that it’s now possible to optimise flash websites, but it’s going to be reasonablycomplicated. Not only do we need to understand what Google can now do, we need to be realistic in that it’s still a handicapped approach when competing against non flash websites.
Another thing to consider is that flash still requires the same basic ingredient for success that an HTML website requires. Content! If the designer or client thinks they can just place lots of videos and images and moving features on the site without any supporting words, then the flash optimisation will not work. Optimisers need to discuss this with their client and make the client fully aware of the issues and the techniques to overcome those issues. Then ask the question. Can we build the site without relying completely on flash? If not, then continue with your flash optimisation strategy.
To optimise a flash website for organic search results you will need to:
- Have a well thought out strategy with a high level of understanding of what Google can actually do andhow they do it.
- Do your standard SEO keyword research that identifies your target keywords.
- Map your target keywords to your content.
- Use a Flash developer who knows how to build using Flash best practice. This may require them to spend more time on the development than they normally would.
- Create a separate flash file (the equivalent of one HTML page of a normal website) for each target keyword and then link your navigation between these files so that each file sits on its own URL (has its own html page with the flash file embedded on it). Content that is not important can sit in another flash file that makes up the rest of the site.
- Have content that supports your target keywords andpreferably feed this into your flash files using another file such as XML and allow Google to read this content.
- Not spam Google by being tempted to vary content between the flash file and other external files.
- Do all the normal link building and external promotion a website requires.
gavin is a leading australian optimiser currently the seo manager at dgm australia with over 10 years search engine optimisation experience having recently won an australian iab award for his work at dgm.