Whenever I see flashing images or text on web sites, I’m reminded of tacky, faux-cool web pages from the 1990s. Remember web page creation services like WebSpawner?
Kevin at LexBlog blogs about flash, and although I didn’t have the facts, I somehow knew it intuitively: Google hates flash. He writes:
Flash sucks for search engines, there’s just no other way to put it. Law firms and professional services firms use as much flash to do pretty things on the first page of their Web sites as just about anyone. And I assume it is not because they like to do things that suck.
Here’s the deal. Google indexes content - text it can see on a Web page. Web pages with a flash file often include little, if any, text. The result is that Google cannot tell who you are, what you do nor where you are located. That’s not good.
Flash is not good for SEO, and it’s tacky. Did I mention tacky?
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October 23rd, 2005 at 1:00 am
Along with other members of the search engine optimization community, I have been saying for quite some time that Flash is not search engine friendly. I have also said that the search engine robot spiders are unable to follow Flash. In many of my SEO articles on the subject, I have included the recommendation to avoid Flash links on web pages. If a web page must, for some reason contain Flash, then it’s essential to also include a standard html link for the spiders to follow. It appears that Google has finally decided to admit the SEO community was right on the issue of Flash.
October 27th, 2005 at 2:44 pm
on flash
It’s fine as an accent, like an ad or a header, but as an entire website? That’s what I call design getting in the way of content. I have to clear through the mess of flash to get to the good stuff. If I were watching a movie, that would b…