So a few weeks ago Google announced that they have updated the indexing ability for flash. While this is seemingly good news for flash users on church websites like clover, it still doesn’t offer a complete fix. Google now can follow page links inside the flash. But even though they say its working, they want developers to check all the links inside the flash and make sure they are in the sitemap file. This tells me they haven’t worked out all the bugs yet. And with all Google’s good effort, you still get comments like this:
Adam said…
Why is it that with all the indexing flash and content within flash, are pages with flash still ranking very low? This of course doesn’t apply to nationally recognized brands but to smaller sites that utilize flash. Too many perspective clients have come to me asking why their flash site is ranking terribly low and they have great content that’s useful but still low rankings. I can’t help but notice that flash offers lower rankings compared to HTML and Javascript offerings…
I understand why site ranking is still low. Flash is not programmed like HTML where you put individual links to individual separated pages. Most sites using full flash, have a CMS (content management system) running them. Now the difference between a CMS running on a server using a web-based programming language like PHP, Ruby on Rails, C#, etc. and a Flash CMS is that the CMS running on the server, creates the pages on the server side and pushes it to the client. The client gets a “Static” page and therefor google indexes the static content because it can follow it easier. A flash CMS file holds the programming logic in the same file that is pushed to the client and therefor google would have to interpret the programming to find all the possible content to index.
HTML has the same problem when it’s content is dynamically produced by Client Side Javascript. Google still can’t index that correctly. Content dynamically generated on the client side, has to be interpreted via the programming language, thus making it too hard to index (think of computing time also). Whereas, Server Side generated content is not left up for the spider to interprete, just index.
Here’s another problem; Google can index any text content that the user can see, but I have a feeling that it has a hard time associating that content with individual pages and relevancy inside the page. In a HTML page, Google indexes based on all sorts of factors like keyword density, placement of keywords in association of all the content of page, and also how the content is outlined (i.e. H1, H2, p). With flash, dynamic content is harder to associate those in relevance to the page. Sure you can have correct HTML in the flash file, but how is flash going to know where that content is placed. With one html block, there should be no problem, but what if there is multiple blocks. How will the spider know what is more relevant than another. Also, what if some content is hidden by a layer covering it or for some animation affect.
When Google started indexing Flash 2 years ago, I decided to test it’s indexing ability to see how possible it would be to cloak keywords in content. The purpose was not to see if I could beat google by cloaking for higher SEO, but to see if I could raise some quality scores in Google Adwords. I never used it on any real campaigns but did it for testing. It worked for a few months, then google started watering down the results. Knowing the spam industry (via having to compete with them), they would abuse this to no extent.
With all these factors in flash, I believe Google has no choice but the water down the potential of a Flash based website.
So what do you think?
Flash, Google, Indexing
