Flash Site an SEO Disaster?

samtb13

samtb13

TrumpRunning.com
Feb 12, 2011
4
0
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Oregon
www.trumprunning.com
I just took on a new site and want to hear your thoughts on sites that are mainly designed in Flash.

The home page is all flash and about 2/3 of all content that you read is in flash. The blog is primarily the only thing that shows up in Google search.

Do I recommend that the flash be converted to HTML so that it will be indexed in Google?

Is there anything I can do SEO wise with the Flash...as far as making it more appealing to the search engines?

Thx.
 


Some random thoughts:

Convert homepage to html with smaller flash sections for the motion/animations. And if there aren't any animations or other sutff that requires flash then ditch flash.

Sweet SEO friendly navigation menus can be built using CSS+JS.

If the blog is performing well build on top of that with articles that target high volume searches.

Is your URL structure optimized? If you change it make sure you setup redirects.
 
try to put atleast one pragraph on landing page , so google crawler will able to crawl the data on index page
 
I never had a good experience with a flash site, especially those that have a flash navigation menu. Make sure your menu and your main text content is in HTML/CSS and if you want to add in some flash animations that's fine.
 
I always use flash elements.
I use wordpress because it's awesome for SEO (and everything else), but I like how flash looks, so some menu items, some featured items and such are flash, but the rest is normal.
It's the best of both worlds.
I would NEVER design or have a site that is entirely flash.
 
samtb13 said:
I just took on a new site and want to hear your thoughts on sites that are mainly designed in Flash.

The home page is all flash and about 2/3 of all content that you read is in flash. The blog is primarily the only thing that shows up in Google search.

Do I recommend that the flash be converted to HTML so that it will be indexed in Google?

Is there anything I can do SEO wise with the Flash...as far as making it more appealing to the search engines?

Thx.
Click to expand...

Google can read Flash nowadays, but there's still some pretty big disadvantages. Some are avoidable, some aren't.

  • Flash is worth less than HTML to a search engine. Most flash sites have internally contained pages...meaning the search engines can't link you directly to relevant content, but rather have to send you to the beginning of the flash page, whatever that may be. If you're going to do a flash site, you can try and spread it out onto different pages.
  • Google can parse Flash to a limited extent, but I wouldn't bank on either Yahoo or Bing being able to do so.
  • When using Flash, you want to be super-compliant with various web-standards for those without. Not for users(though it can help with iPhones) as much as bots. There should be a non-flash, navigatable version of the page. That should render at the same URLs as the flash if the user can't handle it.
  • Links from X to Y are a weak point in most flash processing. Make sure that if you have multiple pages, you're linking them in some way outside of Flash. And RSS feed/sitemap can also help them find content that might otherwise be lost.
  • Your users will hate you. Fuck Flash.
 
yeah, if its a non interactive, info type site, i'd just go with html .. and use animated images or flash if you want some movement on the site

I guess there are exceptions to this, like when building a game site etc
for all other text driven site, i'd definitely stay away from flash
 
flash should really only be for minisites... if you really want a flash site then make sure you have a duplicate html site
 
If the rest 1/3 is completely seo-friendly, i think its not a problem. And still you have to build the backlinks to push the rank
 
Googlebot dosen't like flash. I don't think I ever found a flash site while searching on google did you?
 
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