There's a conundrum in the design world. The web designer, passionate about aesthetics and functionality, has embraced many tools and platforms for developing engaging content on the web. Adobe Flash and the applications created with it are among the favored tools of web designers, as multimedia animations have proven to be dynamic and engaging elements of any website.
Flash applications have historically posed a challenge to search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of enhancing a website's findability and ranking in search engines. Until recently, search engines were unable to crawl and index content located within Flash applications. Thus, Flash content would not be returned to a searcher in search engine results, no matter how relevant the content was to the searcher's query.
Search engines are the main portal to the web for many Internet users, acting as the primary means of searching for and locating online content that meets their shopping and researching needs. Therefore, it's become a basic site requirement for a public-facing site to be present in a search engine index. Following that, it's a goal of most every site to rank highly among search engine results for queries related to that site's content. You can see why un-indexable Flash-based content could pose a problem.
The SEO conflict with Flash was greatly relieved in June 2008 when Google, the search engine giant, announced it had developed the capability to crawl and index text content within Flash applications.
More recently, in June 2009 Google announced that its ability to crawl Flash had been even further improved. Now, most web developers can be confident that stationary text content contained in Flash applications and in related external resources can be found by Internet users through search engines.
Despite the advancements, many SEO experts caution designers against creating Flash-based sites because the platform may still pose some challenges to search engine indexing and ranking, and not all Flash content can be indexed.
Findability Through Search Engines
Before Google was able to crawl Flash applications, one SEO solution was to include the Flash-based content as HTML hidden under the Flash or in another location on the page. Google warns against presenting one set of content to human visitors and a different set of content to search engines, a practice known as cloaking.
However, analyzing the intent of cloaking is often necessary. If deception is not the intended result and instead the cloaking is meant to make content more accessible, that instance of cloaking may be accepted by a search engine.
As Google's ability to crawl and index Flash is relatively new, it may not yet be foolproof or totally debugged. Therefore, it may be a good idea to ensure that critical elements of a site, such as the global navigation which points to and leads search engine spiders to important category landing pages of a site, are rendered elsewhere on the page in crawlable HTML. See my company's site, BruceClay.com, for an example of a Flash-based global navigation duplicated as an HTML footer.
It's also important to keep in mind two major SEO obstacles with regards to Flash applications. First, in order for text content within Flash to be crawled and indexed, the text must be stationary. Search engines cannot see text that moves or includes an effect.
Furthermore, any links contained within the Flash application must point to a new URL in order for the link content to be crawled and indexed. Links that direct the user to another point within the same Flash application are unable to be crawled by search engines.
Search Engine Rankings
The second important concern for web designers when it comes to Flash and SEO considerations are the ranking factors associated with Flash-based content. There is little external evidence of how Flash-based content is ranked within search engine results.
Does text located in Flash applications count as strongly as Flash located in HTML? Do links embedded in Flash work as a ranking factor? Flash doesn't hold as much contextual information as HTML does, in part because it may not exist within the platform, and in part because Google has spent far more time mastering the signals found within HTML.
Google knows about the many tags embedded within HTML and can rate them, fitting them together and recognizing relationships between them. Designers should be aware that the same contextual information may not be present within Flash applications, and this may have an effect on the way search engines rank Flash-based content.
A designer is tasked with making a site look and feel as functional and engaging as the intended audience requires, yet there are necessary SEO requirements to be considered of the dynamic Flash platform. The inclusion of Flash resources on a website helps to increase user interaction with the site. However, search engines are still developing their ability to parse content from within Flash. The use of this technology should be evaluated carefully before implementation.
