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Home » Other Tips » Why don't search engines like Flash sites?

Why don't search engines like Flash sites?

Flash sites are extrememly popular with photographers, especially template sites like Winklet and Bludomain.   And for good reason.  Flash is a great medium for showcasing images.  And the presentation you can make to potential clients with a Flash site can be very powerful. 

There is, however, a huge potential downside to an all Flash site.  Search engine spiders cannot yet read and index Flash sites.  At least they can't do it well.  And if the spider cannot read your site it will not be added to their index. 

The problem

The problem is that to a search engine spider an all Flash site looks like a blank page with links to your Flash.  Since there isn't anything in the Flash file itself that the spider reads it's pretty much ignored. So all that great content that you put for your visitors to see and read doesn't get indexed and won't help you get found.

Here's a homework assignment for you (don't groan, it's short). Go to your site and view the HTML source for it.  For Internet Explorer users under the View menu there is a Source choice.  Click that.  For FireFox users it's also under the View menu, but is titled View Source.  Click that.  The HTML code that comes up is how a search engine spider sees your site.

The solution

Well, there really isn't a magic bullet type solution. I'm a big proponent of HTML sites with a little bit of Flash as necessary for eye candy.  I'm opposed to all Flash sites except for a few unique cases; and photography sites are not those cases. 

Meta tags will help a little, as will writing text in the HTML code below your Flash.  Note that I'm not suggesting trying to hide the text either by making it really small or the same color as the background.  Both of these are likely to damage your search engine rankings.   If Bob had a Flash site he would write underneath his Flash something along the lines of "Bob Smith Photography - serving Cleveland Ohio since 1997.  Think of Bob any time you need a professional wedding photographer in the Cleveland area."  It's complete sentences, it's geared for humans, but search engines will pick up on it.  And that's the ideal situation - text intended for your human visitors that will help out with your computer visitors. 

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