Google and Flash

Posted by: Rodney Riley | 04 August 2008

Back in July Google announced an important change (Google learns to crawl flash), for years before Flash has been a closed book to its spiders. Content written in Flash was totally invisible and Google simply ignored it so it never featured in the search results. In the early days it was quite common for interactive sites to be written totally in Flash meaning that entire sites were simply missing from the index.

Flash content is fundamentally different from HTML based webpages – much of what can be created in Flash is still not indexable by Google. In the search results Google is focused on text and this is what it looks for in Flash files – it has added the ability to follow links and index snippets of text. This is a good thing and a step in the right direction but a far cry being able to consider Flash content as search engine friendly.

The are many great reasons to use Flash but it is important that users without Flash are still considered and for the time being I would recommend counting Google as a user without Flash. Flash can be used very effectively but giving a static HTML alternative is a must.

Sites built by Mando Group that incorporate Flash use a method called SWFobject which allows Flash content to be overlaid on standard HTML. This is great because it gives the best of both worlds offering dynamic content to those users with Flash and a normal HTML site to those without (this includes mobile devices which using CSS can be given a mobile friendly version). The search engines index the HTML which in terms of text and images is a replica of the Flash. The one hard a fast rule of Search Engine Optimisation is to present the same content to search engines as you do to users so it is vital that the HTML is a faithful representation of the Flash. As long as this rule is followed SWFobject is the best way to make a Flash site search engine friendly and accessible to a wide range of users.

Posted in: Online Marketing