If there is a really hot potato that divides SEO experts as well as Web designers, this is Flash. Unquestionably a great technology to include sounds as well as picture on a Web site; Flash movies are an actual nightmare for SEO experts. The cause is pretty prosaic - search engines cannot index (or at least not simply) the contents inside a Flash file and unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie, you can merely count this text lost for boosting your rankings.
Certainly, there are workarounds but until search engines start indexing Flash movies as if they were plain text and these workarounds are just a clumsy way to optimize Flash sites, although surely they are better than nothing.
Why Search Engines hate Flash Sites?
Search engines hate Flash Web sites not because of their imaginative qualities (or the lack of these) however because Flash movies are too difficult for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a Flash movie directly, as they do with a plain page of text. Spiders index filenames (and you can able to find tons of these on the Web), but not the contents inside.
Flash movies come in proprietary binary format (.swf) and spiders can't understand the insides of a Flash file, at least not without assistance. And even with assistance, don't count that spiders will crawl and index every part of your Flash content. And this is true for all search engines. There may be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time being, search engines are really unified - they hate it but they index portions of it.
What (Not) to make use of Flash For?
In spite of the fact that Flash movies are not spider favorites and there are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. However as a general rule, keep Flash movies at a minimum. In this case less is definitely better and search engines are not the only reason. First, Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they generally tend to skip them. Second, Flash movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Megabit connection or better is still not the standard one.
Basically, designers should keep to the statement that Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it - i.e., you have some text with the main points of the story (and the keywords that you optimize for) and then you have the Flash movie to add further detail or just a visual representation of the story. In that connection, the greatest SEO sin is to have the whole site made in Flash! This is is simply unforgivable and do not even dream of high rankings!
One more "No" is to use Flash for navigation. This applies not only to the initial page, where once it was fashionable to splash a gorgeous Flash movie however external links as well. Though it is a more common mistake to use images and/or javascript for navigation, Flash banners as well as movies must not be used to lead users from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to build site navigation.
Workarounds for Optimizing the Flash Sites
Even though a workaround is not a solution, Flash sites still can be optimized and there are large numbers of approaches to do this:
Input metadata
This is a very significant approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as significant to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily adding metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to go away the metadata fields empty.
Provide alternative page(s)
For a good quality site it is a must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages require more work but the reward is worth because not only users, however search engines as well will see the html only pages.
The Flash Search Engine SDK
This is the life-belt. The most advanced tool to take out text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool which is named as swf2html. As it name implies, this tool extracts text as well as links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output into a standard HTML document, thus saving you the tedious work to do it manually.
However, you still want to have a look at the extracted contents and correct it, if needed. For instance, the order in which the text and links is arranged may need a little restructuring in order to put the keyword-rich content in the title also in headings or in the starting of the page.
In addition, you need to check if there is no duplicate content between the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The font color of the extracted text is also an additional issue. If the font color of the extracted text same as the background color, you will run into hidden text territory.
SE-Flash.com
Here is a tool that visually shows what from your Flash files is able to seen to search engines and what is not. This tool is very helpful, even if you previously have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed as it provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text. Moreover, it is not sure that Google and the other search engines make use of Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file, so this tool can give entirely different results from those that the SDK will produce.
These approaches are just some of the most significant examples of how to optimize Flash sites. There are many other approaches as well. On the other hand, not all of them are brilliant and clear, or they can be classified on the boundary of ethical SEO - for example. creating invisible layers of text that is delivered to spiders instead the Flash movie itself. Though this technique is not wrong - i.e., there is no duplicate or fake content, it is very similar to cloaking and doorway pages and it is better to evade it.
Certainly, there are workarounds but until search engines start indexing Flash movies as if they were plain text and these workarounds are just a clumsy way to optimize Flash sites, although surely they are better than nothing.
Why Search Engines hate Flash Sites?
Search engines hate Flash Web sites not because of their imaginative qualities (or the lack of these) however because Flash movies are too difficult for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a Flash movie directly, as they do with a plain page of text. Spiders index filenames (and you can able to find tons of these on the Web), but not the contents inside.
Flash movies come in proprietary binary format (.swf) and spiders can't understand the insides of a Flash file, at least not without assistance. And even with assistance, don't count that spiders will crawl and index every part of your Flash content. And this is true for all search engines. There may be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time being, search engines are really unified - they hate it but they index portions of it.
What (Not) to make use of Flash For?
In spite of the fact that Flash movies are not spider favorites and there are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. However as a general rule, keep Flash movies at a minimum. In this case less is definitely better and search engines are not the only reason. First, Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they generally tend to skip them. Second, Flash movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Megabit connection or better is still not the standard one.
Basically, designers should keep to the statement that Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it - i.e., you have some text with the main points of the story (and the keywords that you optimize for) and then you have the Flash movie to add further detail or just a visual representation of the story. In that connection, the greatest SEO sin is to have the whole site made in Flash! This is is simply unforgivable and do not even dream of high rankings!
One more "No" is to use Flash for navigation. This applies not only to the initial page, where once it was fashionable to splash a gorgeous Flash movie however external links as well. Though it is a more common mistake to use images and/or javascript for navigation, Flash banners as well as movies must not be used to lead users from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to build site navigation.
Workarounds for Optimizing the Flash Sites
Even though a workaround is not a solution, Flash sites still can be optimized and there are large numbers of approaches to do this:
Input metadata
This is a very significant approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as significant to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily adding metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to go away the metadata fields empty.
Provide alternative page(s)
For a good quality site it is a must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages require more work but the reward is worth because not only users, however search engines as well will see the html only pages.
The Flash Search Engine SDK
This is the life-belt. The most advanced tool to take out text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool which is named as swf2html. As it name implies, this tool extracts text as well as links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output into a standard HTML document, thus saving you the tedious work to do it manually.
However, you still want to have a look at the extracted contents and correct it, if needed. For instance, the order in which the text and links is arranged may need a little restructuring in order to put the keyword-rich content in the title also in headings or in the starting of the page.
In addition, you need to check if there is no duplicate content between the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The font color of the extracted text is also an additional issue. If the font color of the extracted text same as the background color, you will run into hidden text territory.
SE-Flash.com
Here is a tool that visually shows what from your Flash files is able to seen to search engines and what is not. This tool is very helpful, even if you previously have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed as it provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text. Moreover, it is not sure that Google and the other search engines make use of Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file, so this tool can give entirely different results from those that the SDK will produce.
These approaches are just some of the most significant examples of how to optimize Flash sites. There are many other approaches as well. On the other hand, not all of them are brilliant and clear, or they can be classified on the boundary of ethical SEO - for example. creating invisible layers of text that is delivered to spiders instead the Flash movie itself. Though this technique is not wrong - i.e., there is no duplicate or fake content, it is very similar to cloaking and doorway pages and it is better to evade it.
Labels: Yahoo optimization
posted by India Seos
@ 11:07 AM
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