This topic has been done to death in the SEO community, but it’s still surprising to see how companies will invest $100,000 on a Flash website with the express intention of improving their search engine rankings. There are some really innovative Flash sites out there, and it’s great to see the creativity, but while they will always be more interactive and, well, ‘Flash’ than traditional HTML/CSS sites, they will always rank lower in SERPs. Always.

100% Flash websites don’t rank well in search engines.

How GoogleBot sees a Flash site

The text and images of a Flash object are stored as a binary format, so what you see animated in the final rendered version doesn’t exist as ‘readable’ text in the containing HTML file. While Google and Adobe have both been getting better at making Flash movies more indexable, it’s still the case that Flash sites index poorly by comparison for 2 key reasons:

• Google’s sophistication of looking beyond keywords to understand context is lost in metadata used to describe the movie content. A 100% Flash site may contain dozens of page with visible text content, but this will be summarized as a handful of keywords. In many cases, designers don’t include the metadata at all.
• Great designers often don’t know much about SEO (sorry, but it’s true). In the example above, which I pulled from an unnamed 100% Flash site, the TITLE attribute is the default value “Intro”, and it’s even missing META DESCRIPTION. A search engine has no chance of understanding this site is for a national bar chain that specializes in jazz and martinis.

SEO is largely a text-driven business – robots can’t read images and Flash well.

Use Flash sparingly

There are some cases where Flash elements on a page will improve the user experience and won’t harm search engine rankings. Typically, these examples tend to be small and not central to the navigation or functionality of the page itself (such as interactive flight booking components on travel sites).

But aside from the SEO problems, there are myriad issues with using Flash:

• There’s no guarantee users have Flash installed.
• It frequently results in much slower loading times, and therefore higher bounce rates.
• Most mobile devices don’t support Flash (including the iPhone).
• Initial design is more expensive and maintenance is usually very painful.
• It’s difficult to make dynamic sites in Flash, compared with non-Flash.
• If you use Google Analytics, your designers probably hasn’t integrated methods to track movements around the site.
• RSS subscribers can’t see your content.
• It’s easy to get carried away with overly complicated animations and graphics and completely lose the user.

Flash is bad for SEO, but it can also just be a bad choice for creating a good user experience.