Flash Design & Google

Why the two don't often play well together

In the past, Google has not indexed Flash pages very well.  It was always the basis for argument between many web designers and website optimizers.  The web designers wanted a "cool" looking site and Flash design was the way to do that while the website optimizers sang out that Google could not index these pages and thus would not be able to read your page well.

In July of 2008 Google did in fact improve their ability to search Flash sites.  As you might imagine, this had some web designers jumping for joy at the thought that they could now design that "cool" website and Google would now crawl it just as effectively as it crawled your basic text-based or CSS website designs.

However, based on some early testing, this has been found not to be the case.  A simple search of Google shows that the indexing of Flash may not be all that it's cracked up to be.

In order to get those high rankings that you most likely want from your site, using Flash as an overall site design could mean ranking failure.

If you've studied SEO for any amount of time, you know that there are certain on-page factors that aid the search engines when they come and index your site.  Some of these things are:

• Keywords in your HTML tags;
• Proper meta descriptions;
• Your site's title;
• The headers you use on your site;
• The links contained on your site's pages;
• Bolded text;
• Italicized text;
• etc.

If you looked at the Google search results above where we did a search for websites using Flash, you'll see that the title tags especially end up looking like a bunch of gobbeldygook.

Additionally, when a website is created using Flash, Flash generates one large file that has the same URL across the board.  This makes it next to impossible to link to an internal page on your site which is a critical off-page optimization factor.  If someone can't link to a specific page and are instead taken to the default home page, you've just eliminated 99% of your off-page linking strategies.

So far, there hasn't been a noticeable improvement in how Google indexes Flash pages.  Perhaps in the future it will be different, but as it stands today, you're far better off keeping it simple when designing your site and sticking to basic HTML or CSS site designs.