Google and Flash - A Dubious Duo
By Craig Hordlow, Chief Strategist
On June 30, 2008, the Google Webmaster Central Blog published a post titled, “Improved Flash Indexing.” The post immediately generated lots of buzz amongst the marketing and web development communities.
The danger here is that the message of their post can be misinterpreted as “Google is now indexing Flash” (as though they hadn’t before or, worse yet, that no SEO concerns remain with Flash).
The discussion on Flash as it relates to SEO falls in two basic categories:
1. How well is Flash indexed?
2. How can I use Flash within my SEO campaign so that it will not compromise results?
Ultimately, the second question is the more important one. Googlebot may improve its indexing significantly, but as long as plain HTML driven sites are the more powerful SEO option, we need to understand how we can and cannot use Flash within that framework.
But let’s back up.
Google has been indexing Flash for years. The indexing has been poor, however, and the improvements made have been limited to reading text-only content. Text in images is still not being read (according to the aforementioned post), and there are technical limitations as well:
1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript – which can result in Flash files not being indexed.
2. External resources are not indexed as part of your Flash file (they are loaded separately).
3. Bi-directional languages (Hebrew, Arabic) are not currently indexed.
Google is working on the issues above, but as long as Flash-driven sites remain a liability in a competitive SEO campaign, these improvements are not as exciting as we might be led to believe.
So why is a Flash-driven site still an inferior SEO option?
1. Google is not splitting up a Flash file into multiple files (in the “pure” SEO sense), so your Flash file will remain one large HTML file. Would you rather optimize your own HTML files, carefully placing keywords in important tags, or have Google making guesses as it does its conversions?
2. An SEO campaign starts with strategy. Even if Google could perfectly index Flash, the basic SEO elements (title tags, H1, H2) don’t have powerful Flash alternatives.
Our recommendations for Flash remain:
• If you intend to have an SEO campaign, build separate HTML entry pages, or minimize the use of Flash to non-critical, embedded components of your well-optimized HTML pages.
• Before you rule out Flash (if SEO is a clear objective), determine whether the content you want in Flash has any SEO value. Often, Flash is used as a creative tool (e.g. to entertain). If your Flash piece is unlikely to be the potential destination of search queries, don’t compromise your creative objectives for an unlikely SEO visitor.