Technology
Flash and SEO
Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the past few years you are probably aware of the never ending debate on Flash and it’s “lack” of SEO capability. However we have found it rather “annoying” that this is still such a debate. Amongst all of these so called experts on Web 2.0, SEO, W3C, internet marketing, interactive development and so on… surely they know what the Flash development community knows. Surely they do. A simple google search on “SEO Flash” brings up numerous results on how to accomplish such a “dangerous, stupid and purely evil” feat.
So why the debate? Why the nonsense? Perhaps all of us within the Flash development community are failing at communicating what can and can not be done when it pertains to Flash and SEO. Perhaps there are too many “non-flash” developers and firms that are clueless on how to use the technology and in order to make themselves feel better they continue to spread horrific and awful rumors abroad. Perhaps SEO firms would have to get off their carcasses and do just a bit more work on sites that use “100%” Flash. Maybe it would force them to learn about the technology first, before generating blogs and sites abound dismissing the technology as anything but a bouncing ball tool. Perhaps it means that every “HTML and CSS” expert would have to learn something “new”. “EEK GASP”!
It is important to understand one thing. SEO is something you apply to a site as a “whole”. It isn’t something you apply just to the .swf(Flash) file, or just to a jpg. It is important to understand what Flash is and isn’t so without any developer jive talk lets break this down in simplistic fashion.
What Flash is: It’s an object. Period. Think of images, counters, java applets etc… just with some slick butt functionality.
What Flash isn’t: Anything except an object. Period.
Just hearing the words “all flash site”, 100% flash site, pure flash site sounds like hideous ignoramus talk. It isn’t even possible. You need HTML just for the Flash “object” to sit within. So there is no such thing as a 100% flash site (by technical definition). Remember, it’s just an “object”… that can cook your breakfast if need be. Don’t expect google or any other search engine to crack open the .swf(flash) file, decode it, and index all of the content inside of it. It isn’t going to happen, nor should anyone expect it to. That’s like asking the search engines to open a .jpg or a .gif to decode all of the zeros and ones used to make the image so it can index it.
You may be interested to know that you can actually deploy methods such as Deconcept’s SWFObject to display HTML content to search engines for indexing that gets replaced by your .swf(Flash) file upon loading of the website by the end user.
You may be excited to know that you can “Deeplink” flash as well, giving the ability to link directly to and/or bookmark specific pages within a flash site. Not to mention utilization of the forward and back buttons within the browser.
You may be floored to know that thanks to Google there is an API available that even allows analytic tracking on Flash sites. Yes, that’s right. Web stats on who is doing what and where within a “Full 120% all inclusive whole no substitute” Flash site.
We hope this sheds some light and a bit of “reality” on this great technology.
Provided below are some great resources on how to accomplish SEO with a site that mainly uses Flash.
(Kudos to the developers and community that continue to push Flash and the web to it’s full potential)
http://blog.deconcept.com/2006/03/13/modern-approach-flash-seo/
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
http://blog.deconcept.com
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