Incorporating SEO for a Flash-Based Website

After reading through various discussions on this topic, it seems like my question still remains unanswered. We are gearing up to revamp our company's website in the coming months. Currently, our site is mostly text-based, which has helped us achieve high rankings on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing for our key terms. However, as an interactive agency, we want to infuse a bit more of a "Wow Factor" into our website while also keeping our strong search engine presence intact.

In our brainstorming sessions, the idea of incorporating Flash, AJAX, and other technologies that may not be SEO-friendly keeps popping up. Each time, we have to weigh the potential impact on our search rankings. If a significant amount of our content ends up being housed within a Flash (swf) file, what steps should we take to maintain our current rankings? I've come across information suggesting that Google does index Flash files to some extent, but I am unsure about the specifics. Is there a way to prevent Google from indexing a Flash file?

Furthermore, I had a thought that I wanted to share with the community to gather feedback. What if we were to build out the site in the usual manner, setting up a logical directory structure, creating content-rich static pages, and then specifying these paths in a Google XML Sitemap file? Could we potentially have search engine spiders crawl only these static pages while offering users a mix of Flash, JavaScript, and AJAX elements elsewhere on the site? If this strategy proves effective, what are the advantages and disadvantages? Thank you for entertaining this unconventional query.

javascriptxmlajaxflashseo

Answer №1

After conducting thorough research, I came across a fascinating article on Google's advancements in indexing Flash-based web pages. Despite their progress, there are still some limitations in three key areas:

  1. Googlebot may not index Flash files loaded via JavaScript, as it does not execute certain types of JavaScript.

  2. External resources loaded by Flash files, such as HTML or XML files, are currently not integrated into Google's indexing process.

  3. While Google can index Flash content in various languages, there are challenges with bidirectional languages like Hebrew and Arabic.

Fortunately, these limitations should not pose a problem for you based on the information provided. It seems that Flash remains a viable option for your needs.

Adobe is also making efforts to enhance the search engine friendliness of SWFs, working in conjunction with Google and Yahoo. With ongoing improvements to search algorithms, any potential dip in ranking should be mitigated within a year or two.

To prevent indexing where necessary, consider adding the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/
Disallow: /directory/page.html

Answer №2

Greetings Andrew,

Dealing with situations like this multiple times, I suggest having both a Flash site for users and an HTML site for search engines. Here's how you can achieve this:

  • Set up a server-side switch to determine if a request is for HTML or the content your Flash movie consumes (XML, JSON, SWF, etc). Ensure that every page on your site can return both HTML and the content for your Flash movie. Using a query string parameter like "requestType=Flash" will do the trick.

  • Place all the content in your HTML pages within a div tag and hide the div using CSS. Utilize SWFObject to check browser support for Flash and replace the HTML content with your Flash movie if supported. Search engine crawlers will only see the HTML content, but you can make it visible to non-Flash browsers (such as mobile browsers) once SWFObject determines the lack of Flash support.

  • After loading the Flash movie, have it request necessary data from the server using the same URL but with the switch variable added.

  • Manage navigation using SWFAddress. When a user requests a new page, pass it through SWFAddress to update the browser history before the Flash movie makes its request to the server.

I am currently implementing this technique for a friend's site (still a work in progress):

     

Each page on the site initially returns the HTML version, which is then replaced by a Flash movie loaded with custom XML data describing the page's content. This approach has led to excellent search engine results in my previous projects, as you can focus on optimizing for search engines without worrying about the visual design for human visitors.

Additionally, structuring your site this way encourages separating content from design, making maintenance, redesign, or overhaul easier compared to bundling everything into a single SWF file.

Hoping this information proves valuable,

Regards, Scott

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