Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

Google announced recently that they have been working with Adobe to improve upon the indexing of Adobe’s Flash technology.  Google now has the ability to index flash components and self-contained flash sites.  Google can gather all kinds of information from flash files.

All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
- Google Webmaster Central Blog

Clients have asked for years about the difference in building an all flash web site versus a web site in HTML made out of flash components.  Our answer has always been, and really still is, that Google and other major search engine players have been indexing HTML content for years and they do it really well. I tell them that our recommendation would be to build all the content in HTML and if they want to add that design flare to their site we can build in flash components.

Does that answer still hold true?

The simple answer is yes.  Although Google, along with Yahoo and others, are now starting to be able to index the content that is contained within flash, it is not still full-proof.  The search algorithms take into account everything from your title tags, your page extensions, H1 header tags, text that is bold and much much more.  To this point, that kind of information can not be obtained from crawling flash sites, so the algorithm can not know what are the most important elements of your flash file therefore leaving that content at an indexing disadvantage compared to an equal HTML site.

SEO expert Vanessa Fox wrote a great article recently on her blog about this very issue of indexing flash-based web sites.  She points out a great example of a site targeting the Tour De France.  This company made a huge investment in an all flash site covering the Tour De France, but you would never know it by looking at their listing.  To quote Vanessa:

For all three engines, even those who do the search because they saw an ad might not be sure if the takebackthetour.com listing is really the official site based on how the listing looks in the search results.

You can see that at this point, Google doesn’t see any content on the site and in fact, notes on the cached page that [take back the tour] appears only in links pointing to the page. Since it can’t extract any text, it has no way of knowing that the site is about the Tour De France.

As you can see from her example above, Google finds NO indexable content, while MSN is displaying “You need to upgrade your Flash Player If you think this is an error, Click Here to bypass Flash version detection.”  Yahoo displays their listing in the number 8 position with the text “You need the latest Flash Player from ADOBE to view this site. Click here to download it, or if you feel that this is an error, click here to bypass detection. …”

That’s not a very good way to explain to your users what the site is about.

So to conclude, while the search engines are making great strides at indexing flash, my recommendation for now would still be to have a good content rich HTML site so that you can benefit from all the indexed meta data that the search engines can gather.  Maybe someday, sooner that later, flash sites will be on an even playground with HTML site.

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