Promotion Tip:
Some Search Engines Index Flash Content

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

Flash is a controversial issue among Web designers. Most either love it or hate it: there seems to be no middle ground. But things are changing - albeit slowly. New products from Macromedia and new search engine technology may be shifting the debate. Designers are discovering that it is possible to add Flash to Web pages without sacrificing either accessibility or search engine promotion.

Unfriendly Uses Of Flash

Often, the basic problem with Flash is that designers use it because they can, not because they need to. Here are some examples:

Generally, anything that's bad for search engines is bad for human visitors too - particularly those using various assistive technologies like screen readers.

You can create great visual effects with Flash, but search engine spiders can't see. They only look at the underlying code of a Web page - HTML code that is. That means important content may be hidden from search engines because it's embedded in Flash files instead of inside HTML code.

Design Considerations With Flash

Whether you're creating Flash-only pages, HTML-only pages, or a mixture of the two, Web site promotion and accessibility needs to be considered during - not after - design.

For instance:

Flash-friendly Search Engines

In 2002, Fast Technologies (they power AllTheWeb and Lycos) announced a new addition to their search technology: the ability to access text content contained in Flash files. It's not perfect, but they do manage to index at lot of text and make it searchable in their database. Search Engine Power Pack's submission tool helps you easily submit one or more pages in your site to both AllTheWeb and Lycos.

Even before Fast's announcement though, Google had the capability to follow links inside Flash presentations. That's better than nothing, but it doesn't help you much with Google's ranking algorithm. Google relies mainly on a site's link popularity score, page content, and structural elements to rank Web sites.

It's great that Google can follow a link inside a Flash page, but if that link just leads to another Flash page, the spider won't have much (if any) content to index.

What would really be great for both Web designers and searchers is if all search engines had the ability to index text content inside Flash files and rank the results along with regular HTML content. Well, that dream may soon become reality!

SDK May Open All Flash To Search Engines

The biggest news regarding Flash and search engines is Macromedia's introduction of Flash Search Engine SDK. It's specifically designed for use by Search Engine Application Teams (the guys who run the search engines). Using SDK, these teams can decompress Flash files, parse the content, and index it in search engine databases.

In theory, that information would be treated just like regular HTML content. With SDK technology in place, you could promote an all-Flash site to search engines as easily as you promote static HTML pages. FAST uses the SDK technology already. Macromedia is working with other search engine companies to have the SDK integrated into their systems too.

But still, even if every search engine company deployed SDK immediately, you might still have problems promoting your site. That's because the same algorithms that index and rank your HTML content will be applied to your Flash content as well. Since developers don't expect Flash content to be indexed, they aren't as careful to optimize it for targeted keywords and other important page elements.

Let Search Engine Power Pack analyze your HTML pages and provide tips to boost your rank in the major search engines. Once you get experience optimizing HTML pages, it will be easier to create Flash presentations that incorporate the same principles.

Flash-friendly search engines are good news for all users. Make sure your site can be found in a crowded, competitive field!