Flash - an SEO nightmare
Votes: 323
In the early days of the Internet, we only had text and graphics, and focused very little on SEO, blindly hoping our meta tags crammed with all sorts of keywords would do the trick.
Then this upstart Macromedia came out with “Flash”, what a marvel! You could animate vector graphics, the files where small, and it looked great. Heck, why not build full websites in it. Graphics people flocked to this idea; you could ignore html and those pesky tables and other markup, and focus on graphics and layout.
What we all failed to realize is, we were putting up barriers to our content, we made our great looking websites using the latest technology because it was simply the latest technology. I see the same thing when you show someone the “lens flare” in Photoshop, it makes it’s way into nearly all of their projects, I was guilty of this.
Flash tried to compensate for it’s lack of SEO presence by putting in rem tags with the content, if you exported the flash + html. We now know this is a bad idea, Google and Co. will blackball you faster than the RIAA’s lawyers extort a grandmother.
<!—Text content of flash document here, terribly ineffective in today’s SEO marketplace -->
So where does flash fit into the SEO picture of today?
Flash and SEO and work together, you need to know their strengths and weaknesses.
Flash is good at:
- Animation
- Charts, graphs – animated
- Media presentation – video, audio
Flash is bad for:
- Main site content, text presentation, anything you’d like Search Engines to find.
- Anything that is mission critical – Navigation, and the like.
- Making pancakes or waffles for Saturday morning breakfast – they were like hockey pucks.
Closing arguments
Sorry to crush any aspiring web designers who love creating full sites in flash, but if you want any search exposure at all learn XHTML and CSS as soon as possible, it will only benefit you. “I’ve gone down that road, I know where it leads”.
Check out mootools or moo.fx if you want fun animations and still keep your content readable to Google.
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