Is Flash Search Engine Friendly?
There are various ways a website can be produced. The most established means is to use Hypertext markup language (HTML 5) with a combination of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and perhaps JavaScript and a scripting language like PHP. But there are alternatives. One that still has advantages is to use a development tool called Flash from a company called Adobe.
Flash technology overcomes one of the shortcomings of HTML in that Flash sites can be more dynamic. They can feature animation, video, and provide a more entertaining and interactive website experience for the user. HTML combined with CSS can also provide breathtaking and animated websites, but Flash takes the approach several steps further. This is to some peoples liking, and not others, but regardless of how you rate interaction and animation as implemented in a website, Flash websites typically have a major shortcoming that is often overlooked. Sites produced using Flash are often as good as invisible to the popular search engines.
Why are Flash websites harder to find on the web?
For any website to be readily found by users, it needs to be indexed by for example the Google search engine. For Google to complete this task it needs to visit the site, explore it, identify its contents and then store that information in the Google system.
This "indexing" as it is called makes a record of what information is accessible in websites, and where that information is stored. Users then benefit from this indexing whenever they search using Google as the search engine then recalls websites that its indexes tell it hold information of interest to the user. HTML web pages are easy to index because they are largely textual in nature. Flash website are vector based, and need not contain any text at all. This means that any indexing that Google will attempt of a website will be near impossible.
Google are attempting to address this problem by enhancing their indexing process to better support Flash technology. However, these things take time, and it will be a long time before this works safisfactorily and Flash developers understand how to exploit this enhanced indexing. So in summary, we currently do not recommend using Flash for search engine optimised websites.
The Advantages of Flash Technology
As seasoned software developers, we are delighted to use Flash technology whenever it is appropriate. We use it to write cutting edge web applications. Typically these require animation, interactivity, and an immediate response to user input. Ironically websites many websites do not need these features. HTML and CSS are often more than adequate to produce a satisfactory website.
Flash permits the development of innovative user interfaces that cannot be matched by any other mainstream software development approach. But there is a downside. The development of large Flash applications is particularly difficult using this sophisticated development tool. For this reason, Adobe introduced Flex.