Why Do Search Engines Hate Flash?

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Macromedia, the inventor of Flash, is working closely with search engines to help them index Flash content- with some success: Google e.g. is known to, at least partially, index Flash sites.

For the search engines Flash is complex to analyze

But why don't search engines like Flash? Wouldn't it be easy to extract text and links from a Flash animation? Basically yes, but there's an underlying problem: Flash animations don't fit into the web page paradigm. The way search engines function is that they analyze web pages and the actual structure of those pages. There are many rules and assumptions that influence a search engine's ranking algorithm: If a keyword appears in a heading, it must be more important than a keyword appearing in the footer, and so on. Also, if there is a web site with hundreds of pages dealing with the same subject, search engines would give this cluster of information a higher ranking than a web site with only two pages.

However, search engines can't decipher Flash animations to a degree, where they would be able to extract pages or semantics (like headings) to come up with a proper ranking for that content. Because of that and because there is much more HTML content than Flash animation, search engines usually don't deal with Flash.

How to deal with Flash? Use it wisely and sparingly

Thus, to ensure high search engine traffic:

• Don't use Flash for navigation bars, since search engine spiders wouldn't be able to follow links to deeper content (unless you have some other means of HTML navigation like a sitemap).
• Don't embed text that is relevant to your site in Flash (of course, unless you have an alternative HTML version).
• Use Flash for what it's really good for: fancy logo animations or interactive advertising or demos

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