Search engine spiders like big, dumb, ugly sites, remember? They like text, and they like links they can follow to discover new pages and other websites. Search engine crawlers care not a whit for lush photography and fancy-pants design elements.
But site owners, and often users, like glitz, glamour, and flash. And Flash, too, as this certainly applies to sites built in Macromedia Flash, which affords the opportunity to construct dazzling animations—for people, at least. Unfortunately, sites that rely too heavily on Flash can be all but invisible to the search engines.
What does a search engine “see” when it encounters a Flash website? To find out, visit Nike.com. As the sites’s Flash intro loads, take a look at the “page source” option in your browser. Here’s a snippet of the not-so-flashy result:
<title>Nike.com</title> |
What a search engine spider “sees” is what it delivers. In Nike’s case, it sees code—not text.
The site’s organic listing description—remember, these descriptors are lifted from the page—doesn’t fare much better. This is what appears in Google’s search results:
Nike
failure; org.xml.sax.SAXParseException:
The reference to entity "re" must end with
the ';' delimite'r.
Nike, a huge global brand, can get away with this. Most businesses can’t. It should also be noted that the major search engines can at least partially index sites built in Flash, but the operative word here is partially. If SEO is a priority, it’s advisable not to build the site in Flash, or at the very least to embed Flash movies into pages on a plain, vanilla, text-rich HTML site rather than going whole Flash hog. Or if a site is to be built entirely in Flash, be sure to build individual site pages rather than create a site that’s one big movie (ergo, one big page), even if transitions make it appear to viewers that multiple pages are going by. Or consider building an alternative non-Flash site, which can be done relatively easily.
This strategy helps redeem Nike.com. Under the nonsensical site descriptor, the following helpful navigation to section pages within the nike.com domain appears:
Nike's Official Online Store
Women
NikeStore
Nikeid
Hear How You Run
Running
Nikefootball
Soccer
More results from nike.com »
Although these sections are built in Flash as well, as least the search engines know they’re there from searchers clicking through to these pages.
Some experts advocate building two versions of the same site: one in Flash, and the other in HTML. Visitors can select their preference on the homepage, which should be keyword rich and contain a link to a site map to allow search engine spiders to burrow down into all the HTML pages. If adopting this strategy, it’s imperative to submit only the HTML site to the search engines to index.
With Flash, the same URL can deliver varying content. This presents obstacles to crawlers, as well as to optimization. The same problems hold true with other rich web technologies and applications such as AJAX and Silverlight.
AJAX (an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications have exploded in popularity in recent years, thanks to their capability to provide smooth and seamless browsing experiences. A prime example of an AJAX Web experience is Google maps. You can zoom in and out or right and left smoothly, rather than the clicking, waiting, and then clicking some more sequence of “traditional” web browsing.
Microsoft’s Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-device plug-in that delivers eye-popping media experiences and rich online interactive applications. It’s growing in popularity with advertisers but should be approached with the same degree of caution by those whose priority is a well-optimized, search-friendly website.
As with Flash, a better approach to AJAX and Silverlight is to embed these interesting and very often useful tools into big, dumb, ugly, but beautiful to search engines (and users, too) HTML websites.