jame106aguilar's Journal

Flash and Search Engines
Many web pages nowadays are embellished with Flash animation products, offered by Adobe. Flash technology allows, in a very simple manner, to insert small animated, vector-based drawings into your web pages.
Appealing as these flash animations may be they do have a huge impact on how the website is seen by the search engines. Due to the limitations of search engine optimization for flash sites conversions and profitability of the website will be affected.
What Are Flash Animations?
When you create an animation, you get a file, named, for example, banner.fla. The ".fla" represents the Flash format extension. In order to display this file in a web page, you need to export it in Shockwave Format (extension .swf). It is this file, once exported, that you will be using for your web site.
Any text that you include in the animation probably won't be indexed by the search engine as they rarely give attention to these formats. In spite of this there are search engines (Google, dir.com etc) that are able to read the text in these Flash components. The result is that any site or webpage that is built entirely in Flash will be invisible to the search engines which index only text content in html format.
Why Use Flash for Sites?
It is not a secret for anyone that search engines don't really like sites that are built using Flash exclusively. These sites rarely contain enough relevant text to allow a good indexing. Above that, not all spiders can read the content of a .swf file. Flash is used though every now and then for mini-sites or for campaign sites.
Here are a couple of reasons people find Flash worth the effort.
It maximizes the animation's impact, which is appreciated in the Internet interactive and visual environment.
It can be combined successfully with other technologies (e.g. PHP, MySQL, XML, images, video, sound, etc.). It is therefore perfectly possible to create a dynamic web site in flash that also has content.
Pros

More content can be added to a smaller sized space without undue compromise of the layout.
Flash components makes it easier to include slide shows and movies into a website.
Flash is ideal for creating banners, ads and flash videos.
It's a good instrument for creating great visual impact and drawing attention to specific points of interest on a web site.
Cons
Flash requires quite a lot of bandwidth and take a long time to load.
Most search engines don't like and don't index Flash.
Modifying Flash websites can be costly if you use third party developers. This is because they may code the project in such a way that it will be difficult to make changes on your own. To get your changes made you will more than likely need to pay an extra fee.
The "Back" button is usually disabled for flash websites and also Google's AdWords won't approve pages that have the Back button disabled. So, beware of this if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.
Flash doesn't care about the visitors' needs - movies that seem endless- sounds that you cannot turn off they will drive your visitors away.
Splash Pages will reduce your visibility in the search engines especially if there is insufficient text on the site that can be used to identify the keywords associated with your products and services.
It is not an easy task to optimize flash for the unpredictable search engines. The amount of time and energy it takes for SEO for Flash websites is far greater than the efforts required for an HTML site.