Problems with a flash website
7 March 2009
Flash is a different programming language to HTML, PHP, ASP and website publishing languages. To have flash on a website it needs to be added as a web object.
Web objects can't be crawled by search engines because any text you see within an object is part of the object - which search engines are unable to read. For this reason search engines are unable to read flash files.
If the whole website is built in flash then search engines won't actually see any of the website's text because it's all inside the object and so search engines will view it as a practically empty website. For this reason search engines will only see your website as being one page and won't be able to crawl other pages unless a sitemap has been submitted to the search engines.
Search engines won't be able to pick up any keywords or key phrases except for those in the meta tags. The only other help to search engines will be internal links from other websites.
Flash banners on a website would be ok because search engines will still be able to read the rest of the text. Except - Some web browsers have flash turned off as it can be seen as potentially dangerous to your computer, and older browsers can't handle flash files properly, and so the look of the website will be very different for some people.
Other media devices such as some mobile phones are still not all compatible to view flash successfully and quite often the website visitor will just be faced with an "F" icon to show that usually there would be flash content in this area.
These days a lot of websites are built using a Content Management System (CMS) and so updates can be made to the website quickly and easily by the website owner - whereas a flash website will need to go back to the flash developer in order for them to change the files.
Flash files can often be quite large and so may slow down the loading time of a website. Recent statistics show that if the website takes longer than half a second to load it will lose 20% of it's visitors. Google also doesn't like slow loading websites and so the page rank score can also be penalised.
In conclusion it is ok to have flash banners or small flash objects on your page, but you should avoid building the complete website in flash. It is more costly, can take longer to load, and although it looks good - it's not going to get you top Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) results. Any flash objects that you do decide to place on your website should always have a plane text alternative for search engines to see and also for accessibility reasons.
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