Flash is still a problem for SEO (and the web) despite Google announcement

July 2nd, 2008 by sean · No Comments

I just discovered that someone on a Web Analytics discussion group misconstrued the recent Google announcement of better Flash search engine crawling support to mean it is now good to use Flash when developing web sites.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While Google’s move is welcome support for all the legacy Flash websites still in circulation, companies shouldn’t generally be deploying new sites made wholly using Flash.

What Google has announced is significant improvements to their ability to extract information, specifically text and links, from Flash objects. Despite what many are trying to read into this, Google already crawled and extracted this information from Flash only sites – this is not exactly new.

What is new is that hit or miss crawling and discovery is probably just mediocre instead of bad. But mediocre is not good nor is it great. Before site architects and designers rush off to develop Flash only websites, they should still consider SEO and non SEO issues with Flash:

Flash only websites are missing the full semantic richness various html tags provide Search Engines for the indexing and ranking process. Flash is a poor substitute for html.
Flash only websites don’t usually provide unique URLs for different site “pages”, necessary for bookmarking, sharing links, inbound linking, detailed web analytics tracking….
Flash sites are almost always slower to load – the browser has to load the flash player (or worse, ask that it be installed), then load the entire site or section of site contained in the flash object.

A more detailed description of the problems inherent in Flash can be found in my earlier article on why Flash is bad for the web.

I’ve seen web designers worth their salt perform wonders with standard html and css. Flash, except in rare cases, no thanks. And no, Microsoft’s Silverlight is no better; it isn’t even cross-platform compatible, despite misleading Microsoft statements to the contrary (no official Linux support; the third party solution, Moonlight, is out of date, thus unusable). In any case, Microsoft’s track record of supporting non-Windows platforms includes non other then their primary Internet tool, Internet Explorer, which is no longer supported on Unix nor on the Mac.

If you really care about your web presence, use the very best web standards: html and css. Or at least proceed at your own informed risk!

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