Many website owners want to have Flash websites as they look impressive. Although Google can index Flash content to some extend, it is very unlikely that a Flash page will get high rankings on Google. Flash content cannot be indexed by search engines. If your website is a pure Flash site, then you can be sure that search engines won’t be able to see 99% of your website content.

Google has several official statements regarding Flash content:

“Search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format.

[…] Any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines. […] We recommend that you use rich-media technologies like Flash primarily for decorative purposes, and instead use HTML for content and navigation.”
“Make sure that your site has a reasonable, seamless experience for visitors without Flash.
This may involve creating HTML-only equivalents for your Flash-based content that will automatically be shown to visitors who can’t view Flash.”
our pages. If this is ‘just’ for comments, then that might be worth considering.”

What does this mean to your website?

If you want to get a reasonable amount of visitors through search engines, don’t use Flash and other multimedia elements for the main contents of your web pages:

  • Only use Flash for decorative purposes.
  • The navigation of your website should use regular HTML a href links.
  • Do not use fancy JavaScript or Flash navigation menus. Most search engines cannot parse them.

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