Search Engine Optimisation and Flash Sites

By Julian Lynch

Account Director

More and more web designers are using Macromedia Flash to increase their site’s interactivity and just because they can. Flash when used in small doses throughout your site is not a major obstacle to your search engine visibility as long as good quality textual content is provided also. However, where the entire site consists of a Flash movie as is the case with some major consumer sites, real difficulties are posed.

If you ask any search engine optimization expert their opinions on using Flash, they will tell you it can be used in the same way that small images are placed on the site, but never created a fully flash site. However, what if you do anyway? Can anything be picked up at all?

Google has always been the first to index different types of content: PDF files, .doc files, etc. You can enter your search term in Google, and along with that search term, use the filetype operator and restrict your search to the file extension ".swf". This will search for your search term only in Macromedia Flash files. You should see [FLASH] just before each listing in the results page that is a Flash document. Therefore, in a way it is possible to optimise Flash pages so they rank well in Google’s search listings.

For example, if you conduct a search on "web design" filetype:SWF (don’t leave off the quotes), Google will return listings that are exclusively Macromedia Flash files. Google can extract much—but not all—the content in the published SWF file. This content includes all the text and all the links in the file, but not necessarily in the order and in the same way you originally authored the file.

In reality very few of you potential site visitors are going to type in "web design" filetype:SWF into Google and you have little control over how your site will be indexed, so we would strongly suggest that you don’t design your site in Flash unless you are planning to built a plain HTML version to go along side it.