Comments on: Don’t Build Your Web Site In Flash

By: Virginia Nussey

Virginia Nussey — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:36:41 +0000

@Sean Parnell, thanks for your comment. As you mentioned, iframes/framesets or Flash can limit the ability to SEO your site to its fullest potential. The tight rope an Internet marketer has to walk with regards to Flash is balancing SEO requirements against user experience. You may decide that the MP3 is critical to the user’s experience on your site. In that case you would want to set up Flash in a way that search engines can “see” the content as much as possible. There are ways to set up deep linking into Flash apps and ways to try to get the search engines to follow links and index some of the content. A Flash application wouldn’t be as SEO friendly as a straight HTML site, but it might be appropriate depending on the site and the competition.

By: Sean Parnell

Sean Parnell — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:42:09 +0000

I agree that it is still wise to avoid completely Flash-driven sites, particularly as they currently will not load on an iPhone without a cumbersome workaround that most people have never heard of…

Anyway, this leads me to a question: if we’re using good ol’ HTML for our web design, how can we implement a continuously playing (and looping) mp3 player so that music plays continuously (without hiccups or restarting the song) as the user navigates through the site? It seems using some form of website frames (taboo!) is the only way to do so, but doesn’t that hurt your SEO results because search engines can get confused as to which frame the website’s content is located in? Please let me know if there is an HTML non-frame solution or an HTML SEO-friendly frame solution for continuously playing MP3s on a website. Many thanks in advance!

By: Seo Service

Seo Service — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:38:18 +0000

yes… in the point of seo view, flash content is fundamentally different from HTML on webpage URLs, and being able to parse links in the Flash code and text snippets does not make Flash search-engine friendly.

By: Richard Vanderhurst

Richard Vanderhurst — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:15:33 +0000

Flash sites looks good but when it comes to ranking, it’s very poor.

By: ADT Home Security

ADT Home Security — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:37:51 +0000

You can build a page in Flash and still put SEO in it.
We use the coffeecup flash software and they have a feature to put ALT text for your flash. We have had several sites built in flash that do well in the serps.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:21:19 +0000

I am a 3d artist and was looking into putting some flash in my website to make it pop more. Wouldn't it be beneficial as an artist to have more flare and creativity in this instance? I agree with your words, but only in a down and dirty, get to the business kind of sense.

Would i still benefit from non-flash content?

By: Mohammed Alaa

Mohammed Alaa — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:03:45 +0000

Hey Guys,

I think people need to know why to use Flash and when! and forget
about the search engine optimization for now…

so if you want to use flash then you wanna showcase something, heavy animation
or interactivity. "in this case you are going to spend a HUGE money on
marketing your website online and make people link to your website"

I think the main reason the article is posted just to warn people that if you
will make your website in flash. the SEO result will not be the same or it will
not be as you expect. (but of course you might have a reason to make it
flash)

It doesn't matter how much you will spend you will be LIMITED… Believe me this
will not be an ISSUE for long time they will discover a solution because simply
Microsoft and Adobe are going deeper with using 3D in their Application (Silverlight,
Flash, Air etc…)

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:33:17 +0000

The thing that most people seem to miss is that you CAN do proper SEO with Flash. It’s been done before.

For a VERY simple example:
http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml

It’s like any tool, and any project. You get skilled people to do the work, and they produce good work. Get crappy people and…well, you get crap.

You can make an html site, and get a really crappy SEO person do the SEO work on it, and it won’t do much better than a Flash site. Get a great SEO person and you’re going to get much better results. Same goes for Flash and Flash SEO.

Everyone is biased towards Flash because there are 100,000 tutorials written by fools that other fools can copy/paste crappy code from and have their very own ugly flash piece.

Flash is a development tool given to designers.

What do you think would happen if someone made it easy for designers to do stuff with PHP? It’d be a mess. Unfortunately that’s Flash, and Flash gets a really bad rep because 98% of the people who use it don’t know how.

That said, I still build most of my websites all HTML, because SEO is better, and easier to do than it is in Flash.

By: Russ Jones

Russ Jones — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:07:19 +0000

I believe this still holds true: Should I Build My Site in Flash?

By: MrSteel

MrSteel — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:52:40 +0000

You are so funny…