Flashback SEO
January 14th, 2008 by Dan
As always with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) there’s a never ending battle between development and standards. With the rise of more complicated site layouts being released all the time it makes certain websites inaccessible to users with less capable machines, the term “1 shoe fits all” no longer applies to the world wide web.
Within the last 5-6 years we’ve seen the boom in the popular web format .swf otherwise known as Adobe Flash. This is a brilliant product which has boosted the interactivity and lessened the “static-ness” of the internet for good.
Whilst flash has it’s benefits, like everything else that tastes good in this world, it also has it’s fair share of drawbacks. The major fault still apparent today as it was years ago, the download of the flash player needed to play those .swf files.
Most of the time working with whole flash websites for SEO’s is a nightmare, huge portions of content needs to be re-written so that the search engines have some static content to crawl through.
Another experience is using javascript to dynamically write in the flash movie into the document. Reason behind this is to ensure users on alternate web browsers will not get the famous “click to activate and use this control” warning. So from a user perspective you’ve now given 2 things that need to be enabled in the browser for the website to render correctly.
Some people like to use the <noscript> tag to determine that if javascript is not enabled display the following lines of code contained within the noscript. This is good but not solid enough to solely rely on. Some flash detection also needs to take place and if your willing to divert users who don’t make the grade to a HTML version of your website the better, not to mention this will also maximize your potential user base!
Whatever happens, whatever the drawbacks I can whole heartedly say that flash has made a huge impact on the way we interact with the web forever and with the speed flash is continually evolving I am very excited for the future.
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There is no doubt that the Flash animations or the flash movies increase the site’s interactivity with humans. With the help of these animations, the visitor spends more time on the site than any normal content site. But these flash sites take a very long time to open than the normal sites and so, I don’t think that these flash sites makes any effect on SEO strategies as the robots of the Search engines read only the code and the content from source.