Flash is often labeled as the SEO death sentence for websites. Equally perceived as bad is also Ajax but by employing other techniques you can bypass the short comes of both Flash and Ajax and still make your website SEO friendly. Well…almost.

Flash is still a powerful technology that can deliver an enhanced user experience. That is why, aware of the poor engine support, Adobe creators released a software development kit that converts Flash files (SWF) into HTML documents. To some degree this effort has paid off and Google is now able to index Flash files, using their own software. 

HTML vs Flash

You can test to see how a Google search for a Flash file looks like by typing “keyword filetype:swf”. Replace “keyword” with whatever word you are looking for. Keep the rest “filetype:swf” exactly as is.

Even in that case, the Google spider is still pretty confused about the file hierarchy. This makes achieving good SEO very difficult.

Whenever competing with straight HTML on the same keywords, Flash will always rank lower, so why bother?

Another element missed by the Flash to HTML conversion is the usage of meta tags. Although not as popular as it used to be, meta tags are still taken in consideration by other search engines (Google not included), and if you have even a 1% chance of listing with them, why not take advantage of it?

The combination of Flash and HTML is called a Hybrid page and Bobby Van Der Sluis wrote an awesome article addressing this particular issue on http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashembedcagematch/

Single Flash sites have the following disadvantages:

1. Poor indexing power with search engines.
2. It breaks the browser’s “back” button rendering it non-operational.
3. Is not able to provide unique URLs for bookmarking or sharing purposes.
4. Requires all alternative content for the entire site to be embedded in one HTML page.
5. Prevent direct navigation to content
6. Takes longer to load

Flash has evolved tremendously over the past 5-6 years. In fact there are specialized design companies that will build entire websites using only Flash.
Although Flash can wow and can be quite enticing, there are still major disadvantages of using Flash vs. HTML and there a way to go in this “battle”.

 Claudiu Geanta is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Design by Satori Inc. & Satori CG Inc.. He helps businesses promote their presence on and off line. He is also an accomplished web designer, book writer and photographer. You can follow him on Twitter.
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