4 Solutions to SEO problems of using Flash
Many of us has seen a website with Adobe® Flash®. It has attracted many website surfers every since Macromedia came out first with Shockwave® and then create a more lightweight version for the web, Flash. It’s main strength is the animation capabilities along with a strong scripting language that seems no one else on the market has matched . With the lack of competition and a superb product, it is supported by almost every browser and operating system with many third-party add-on tools made by several companies. It’s no surprise to see many sites using Flash these days.
But the problem is, Flash, just like images and videos, these are not made in a plain text language embedded within the HTML code using tags. A browser plug-in is used here that needs to be installed at least once in order for the web browsers to display Flash websites properly. With current day bandwidth standards this just takes a few minutes or even seconds.
Flash is in a binary file format, not in plain text which makes it more difficult to consistently or not possible at all for some search engines to extract the content found within a Flash file.
Do SEO professionals hate Flash?
Depends on who you are asking, I have heard many people in the SEO industry that just hate Flash period! Just because they claim these sites cannot be search engine optimized. The feeling can be mutual from some of the web design and development community that loves Flash and AJAX and just hates SEO (watch related funny videos).
Flash and AJAX are two technologies that enhance the user experience on a website and these technologies are going to stay here for a long time. Thus should be embraced by the SEO community and learn all the workarounds on (more…)