Flash has been a hit ever since it was born, and more and more sites employ flash within their sites to razzle dazzle the audience.  Many sites are 100%-flash-based and while on the surface it might seem “cool” to run a site that is a “flash site,” the rest of the world won’t ever know about it because it is very hard to rank well on Google and the other search engines.  Without Google pointing the way, it will be very hard to share all that joy in the Flash you’ve developed.

 

The 10,000 foot view is that Flash doesn’t fundamentally structure website content in a way that Google can use to determine what’s important, relevant, and the focus of any given site, section or page.

 

 

Flash itself is not evil, but regarding SEO, you cannot really employ a lot of impactful search engine optimization tactics that will boost your site’s rankings.  Thus, competitor sites that don’t rely heavily on flash for navigation, displaying text & documents, etc will easily have an edge up on your site and rise up above your site for various keyword searches.

 

 

The question really becomes: Do you really need to use Flash?  Are you compromising content and practical user experience for flash-based gimmicks?  Can you achieve the same objectives as your Flash-object with other methods?

 

 

First, you should go to the source – Google.  Their webmaster guidelines gives tons of help and clues for various subjects just like this one: Does Google index sites that use Macromedia Flash?

 

 

Next, here’s a bunch of references regarding why Flash-websites are not good for SEO:

 

 

And here’s some more reading for how to best approach Flash for SEO purposes:

 

 

Finally, here’s one resource that shows you what search engines can see in your flash files:



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