SEO, Accessibility, and Flash
I’ve never been a big fan of Flash since in its native form, and inserted using Dreamweaver, it is very search engine unfriendly as well as non-valid code. Search engine spiders are set up to read static html content, not a running program, which is what Flash is. Unfortunately the same problems that Search Engine spiders have are shared by screen readers and other alternative devices.
But there are some very smart people in WebDev, and a few of them have figured out a way around this problem. There’s an article by Jonathan Hochman, entitled “How to SEO Flash” with one technique. It involved hand coding in the flash movie along with a sniffer script which will send both non-flashed browsers, alternative devices such as screen readers, and search engine spiders to alternate content that is readable. I haven’t checked to see if the code is then valid, but I can’t see why it couldn’t be made so, using this method alongside Flash Satay.
I doubt I’ll be diving into flash development any time soon, but this does make it a more attractive option than it used to be.
Technorati Tags: SEO Flash, Accessibility Flash
January 9th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Yes, I completely stopped using Flash years ago when I realized how my sites were performing with Flash, compared with those who were not using Flash. It made a very big difference when it came to SEO’ing. Thanks for the article, I will be sure to check it out.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
I know Google has begun to read .swf files for content, not sure about how the rest of the engines treat flash, however I am sure they are will be fast to follow Google’s lead. It may still be difficult to optimize in the standard sense, but it’s getting easier. - I have noticed Google treating embedded .swf files as completely seperate pages atleast on occasion, that might make seo a bit more tricky.