Simon Metz - Engagement Director

For many years there has been a struggle between designers who wanted Flash movies on web pages and search engine optimization experts who wanted the page data to be presented as HTML for search engines. the search engines couldn't access the data and some sites, particularly those with navigation within the SWF file, were invisible to Google.

What needs to be factored into this whole conversation is the potential that Flash "may" have a limited future. Many, and foremost Apple are doing there best to point out Flash's many downsides and push for rapid adoption of HTML5 and the H.264 digital standard. With the growing adoption of senior executives of the iPad platform, this may become a moot point. On all the web engagements that I manage, there is now a requirement that video is served up at HTML 5 as a primary or at most secondary option.

Google can now index the text within Flash presentations, so SEO professionals no longer need to resort exclusively to copying text from the flash file into HTML text. As long everyone understands how Google sees the text within Flash presentations a site can have Flash components and indexable content. Google has launched a “deep algorithmic change that enables them to “read” Flash files and extract text and links from it for better indexing and ranking. Adobe says they have developed an optimized Flash player for search engines and are collaborating with both Google and Yahoo!. Google has become very open about their updates to make Flash more crawlable

BUT text in flash is unstructured and cannot be pointed to directly so a page's ranking will not be much improved. Currently only the quantity of textual content from flash in Google's index will rise. The quality rankings of such content must yet to be seen and more to the point, most flash pages are an application, such as .php. jsp, or ,aspx which renders HTML and may also utilize an XML file where the text resides. This back end content will still be mostly invisible to the search engines.

The recommended Flash SEO method uses HTML which is search-engine-accessible, primary content, and an open source Javascript function called swfobject() to detect if the user can view Flash content. When the user can view Flash content, the JavaScript replaces the HTML with Flash. Most search engine spiders can't handle Flash, so they will elect to view the primary content. The primary content may contain links, headings, styled text, images—anything we can add to an ordinary HTML page. With SEO copy editing and coding skills applied to the primary content, Flash becomes a non-issue.

Flash accessibility programming isn't spamming, as long as the primary content and the visible movie are the same. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) specifically states that multimedia content should have an alternative representation available. Accessibility programming creates a better user experience for those with Flash, but still allows user without Flash AND search engines to view the same content. This keeps to the mantra, build the site for users, not search engines.