Are SEO and Flash Incompatible? - By: Kathryn Dawson

Poor Flash. It has always been an uphill battle for Adobe to get it’s proprietary animation software accepted by developers and manufacturers. Indisputably one of the most elegant and flexible of the interactive, multimedia platforms Flash’s long battle to the top of the internet application ‘must-have’ list was hard fought. For over a decade Adobe has struggled to make sure flash plug-ins were compatible with each of the various evolving web browsers as well as maintaining functionality across a variety of platforms. Even today, as Flash is widely regarded as a leading tool for web development Adobe is facing new hurdles to maintain its market position.

One of the main difficulties facing Adobe is convincing web developers to continue developing flash-based web content in an increasingly SEO (Search Engine Optimization) oriented marketplace. For years SEO experts have rightly advised their client against reliance on Flash content. Particularly prone to SEO failure are sites whose home page and menu is composed in Flash. The crux of the problem was the method by which search engines explore and catalog websites. Search engine spiders and robots (as the programs used for such purposes are commonly referred) for years have ignored SWF (ShockWave Flash) movies simply because they have not been sophisticated enough to recognize the content in a manner appropriate for cataloging.

In other words even if a search engine spider were to look at a SWF movie it would only recognize the components as images, and not actually ‘read’ what the images represented. Simpler still, the robot would ‘see’ a button, but never realize the button says ‘start here’. Therefore even if the robot loaded an SWF file it might never figure out how to access the deeper levels of content.

With the increasing importance being put on Search Engine Optimization in the past few years both Adobe and Google have begun a concerted effort to help bridge the gap between SEO agents and Flash developers.

Since 2008 Google and Adobe have been working on improving Google’s search algorithm so that it can now recognize the text elements of embedded SWF files on the web. As might be imagined while this is a huge development for the advancement of Flash and SEO it is an imperfect solution. Google and Adobe are encouraging Flash developers to follow new text standards to help assist the algorithm in it’s work, but the word is spreading slowly. Also the adoption of new standards by developers does nothing to help with the search of most of the millions of previously existing SWF objects currently online, though both parties are optimistic that as the algorithm improves, so will the search options for older SWF files.

Adobe has independently established an SEO for Flash advisory site, which gives examples of not only the new standards best served by the newest Google algorithms but also tips on seo marketing for developers who use Flash content. Much like SEO for HTML content Flash developers are encouraged to make strong use of Metadata and Alt text. Fields unseen most of the time by users but very useful to search engine spiders.

Recently renowned technology book publisher O’Reilly has released the long-anticipated title SEO for Flash which is written to cover all aspects of Search Engine Optimization for sites with light, medium or heavy Flash content usage.

Sadly, all of the parties involved regret that while great strides are being made in educating developers on how to get the most SEO value through text-based search algorithms and using traditional methods of SEO such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, there does not seem to be any tool near to being released which will allows the indexing of audio and video content.

About the Author

Kathryn Dawson writes articles for Strategy Internet Marketing, a leading seo marketing company based in the UK providing web optimisation solutions such as pay per click management and article marketing to increase awareness of your businesses.

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