By: Dale Knauss, Show Producer

On June 30th, 2008 Google announced that Flash websites, a previously taboo subject among Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals, could now be easily indexed and ranked by Google’s search engine. Concurrently with this announcement, Adobe announced that not only Google but also Yahoo would have the ability to index Flash files.

This announcement has caused great excitement from the Flash faithful who have long been plagued with trouble getting high search engine rankings. It has also caused many HTML fanatics to balk in disgust and quickly try to tear apart the effectiveness of such a search.

According to the developer’s website, Adobe Flash is “the most advanced authoring environment for creating rich, interactive content for digital, web, and mobile platforms. [You can] create interactive websites, rich media advertisements, instructional media, engaging presentations, games, and more.”
Its popularity stems from the ability to animate and design interactive websites and videos in a way that normal HTML sites could never hope to. Many designers enjoy the stunning visual interface that can be created in Flash and prefer it over the text based HTML format.

Unfortunately, as anyone involved in search engine optimization knows, Flash has been practically invisible to search engines because the image based content was entirely unreadable by the search crawler. Text and links could not be seen and therefore it was nearly impossible to assign a page rank. Because of this problem, Flash sites were seen as unusable and generally tossed aside by anyone interested in getting high search engine rankings.

Of course now Google has claimed to solve this complicated issue. That means it’s time to start using Flash to generate beautiful interactive sites while also getting top search engine rankings, right? Not so fast.

While Google is now better at indexing Flash, the technology is not yet perfect. By Google’s own admission “Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript.” This means that many Flash pages that utilize JavaScript will still be hidden from search. Google goes on to mention that non-Flash content is indexed separately from Flash content, even if they are on the same page. They also note that the Googlebot is still not able to ‘see’ images and Flash videos.

There are even more not Google related problems with Flash that do not seem to translate well into search technology. For instance, an entire Flash page is generally only one document as opposed to the many different documents in HTML. You will notice that a Flash site stays on http://www.healthdirections.com/ no matter where you go on the website. By contrast an HTML site is made up of many pages like http://www.rssray.com and http://www.rssray.com/blog. Search engines index each page of an HTML website separately, something they will not do with Flash. 

Another major issue has to do with tagging a website, a commonly accepted best practice for HTML websites. Heading, paragraph, image, nofollow, and other tags are not available in Flash but are very important for SEO.

Of course, I have no doubt that Google has a team of highly qualified overworked engineers who will eventually solve these, and the rest of the world’s problems. So let’s look at another issue with Flash that should worry us even after Google has perfected this technology.

First and foremost Flash takes while to load, even with hard work by the designer, Flash intro pages are generally slow loading and may turn many visitors away. Likewise many simply do not like Flash for various reasons and will be instantly turned off by a website that uses it. In fact, many computers and most mobile devices do not have the Flash viewer installed so they would not be able to see a website made in Flash.

Finally a Flash site can greatly impair website usability, a very important part of a successful website. Because the entire site is on one page, clicking the back button leaves the site rather than simply going back one page. This can get annoying if you need to delve deeply into a site to find what you are looking for.

While all this technical jargon is all well and good, what we as marketers should care about is one simple question “will using Flash websites make us more money?” And the answer to that is a resounding no.

Flash websites can be incredibly visually pleasing and the interactivity that Flash allows opens up a world of possibilities. It is certainly understandable why many feel that Flash would be beneficial to visitors who have grown tired of HTML.
Google has made significant strides towards making Flash easily searchable but it is obvious that they still have a long ways to go. Creating a Flash based website at this point would be like buying all the expensive ingredients to turn lead into gold before you were sure the alchemy works, it’s simply a bad idea. For the record: that alchemy thing never worked out.

Though even if Google were to perfect their indexing of Flash pages and their ability to rank them correctly, that still leaves the massive usability issues inherent in the program itself. Load times would likely be an issue for the foreseeable future and many will never download a Flash player. Would we as marketers be wise to create our websites in a way that was inaccessible to many of our target customers? Should we risk alienating the vocal minority who dislikes Flash in order to add some small application or graphic? This seems like a completely unwise strategy for an untested search technology.

Let’s all applaud Google for a great step forward in indexing Flash pages and get back to doing what works: Creating highly optimized, easy to navigate HTML websites that have a proven track record for getting results.

Tags: Adobe, Flash, Google indexing, seach flash, Search Engine Optimization, SEO