Using Flash To Display Content

It's very common for webmasters to ask themselves and others if Google and other search engines index the tricky SWF files or not. The answer is yes; Google and many other search engines do index SWF files, thanks to the Flash Search Engine SDK packaged offered by Macromedia, which extracts the content and the links from SWF files and presents them to the search engines as HTML documents.

The more important question, however, is: should you display content using Flash? No, you most definitely should not. If you are planning on doing this, you're missing the purpose of Flash (which is not a subject that's going to be covered in this article.) If you are building a content-driven website, not only you won't have the guarantee that all search engine crawlers out there will be able to index it, but the overall browsing experience will be degraded, since a good number of Internet users have Flash disabled, don't have Flash at all or are using mobile devices to access your website, which have a limited bandwidth and screen space.

The conclusion therefore is that we know that to some extent Google and a few other web crawlers are able to eventually index the content of your SWF files (even though it may take some effort and time), but most importantly, if you want to give the user a rich user experience in a content-driven website, you should sharpen your CSS, Javascript and AJAX skills in order to achieve something similar to what you would using Flash.

Flash Intros and Crawlers

Another common question is how do crawlers react when the first page of a website is a Flash intro, and not the content itself. There is no definite answer to this, since it depends on how you create your intro. If you place a clean Skip or Continue to Website HTML link next to the presentation, there is no doubt that crawlers will be able to follow it and get to the actual content of your website.

In case you don't have an HTML link, and your Skip button is located in the Flash itself, the chances that the crawler will get past the intro from the first try are lower, and it depends on its ability to convert the SWF file to HTML. However, even if it doesn't manage to do that, the crawler will most likely become aware of the inner pages that are behind the intro from direct links from the web.

The worst case scenario is when you don't have any Skip link or button, and don't have any inbound links to your inner pages either.

If you feel like you really need to use a Flash intro, it is important that you build a site map that is plain HTML and CSS, and ensure that it is linked from a page that the crawler is aware of. But keep in mind that even so your search engine ranking will suffer, since your inner pages are not linked from your homepage as far as the crawler is aware.

The conclusion is that you should keep Flash intros to a minimum, offer a Skip or an HTML Version button to at least make the best of this bad SEO scenario. Another approach you can take if you have an HTML version and a Flash version of the website, is to look at the User-Agent string of the visitor. If it is a crawler, you can send him directly to the HTML version. This is on the borderline of cloaking however, so you should be careful not to go too far with this.