Flash Websites And Google - The Lowdown

Asking for a website built in Flash used to make the SEO department cringe in horror and requests for optimisation were met with a wan smile and a "good luck with that". It’s not that Flash websites are inherently bad – they’re often fun, interactive and look far more awesome than a boring old HTML site. The trouble was that search engines just couldn’t crawl SWF (Flash) files so all the information within was a mystery. Without any data about Flash sites, search engines had no reason to rank them.

In June 2008 Google released an update to their algorithm that improved its ability to index SWF files. This was thanks to a partnership with Adobe (makers of Flash) who decided it was about time they made their product more attractive to developers. Basically, Adobe provided Google with a special Flash Player that explored a Flash application just like a user would – ’clicking’ on things and ’typing stuff’ into boxes to see what happened. This allowed Google to index the application without the developer having to do anything at all and was a huge step forward for Flash.

What Exactly Does Google Index?

Google doesn’t index images within a SWF file, but it does index all the textual content. One major point to bear in mind however is that if your Flash application loads content from elsewhere, for example an external HTML or XML file, Google will see this as a separate page. Any textual content your Flash site draws from an XML file then, won’t help that site in the rankings.

You can see this in action through a nifty experiment – the XML file in this case was indexed, but it was indexed as a separate page and not as part of the SWF file.

What Does This Mean For SEO?

The cornerstones of SEO are (currently) content and links. Realistically, will a Flash website have more of either than an HTML site? Well, No. A lot of Flash pages draw their content from external files and as we’ve seen Google treats these as separate entities. Flash sites therefore will probably appear pretty thin on content compared to their HTML counterparts.

As for links, SEO utilises ’deep-linking’ – linking to relevant internal pages of the website instead of to the homepage. With HTML this is easy – you just type out the relevant web address. How on earth do you deep-link to a Flash application? You can’t link to a page; you have link to a state of the application. Adobe has some guidelines that developers will understand, but it all seems a bit complicated for your average webmaster (i.e. me). If webmasters can’t easily create deep-links then Flash sites will struggle to prove their popularity.

Today’s Moral

It’s great that Flash content can be indexed by Google but there’s still a long way to go until it competes in the rankings. If you want to build your site in Flash feel free – Google will index it without any work from you. If you want it to rank however, especially in a competitive market, you’re better off using HTML.