Flash Sites and Search Engine Visibility

Flash is a wonderful way of creating web sites with visual flair. Web designers love to use Flash because Flash provides a way to deliver vector images ”as opposed to bitmap images ”over the web. Vector graphics are scalable, which means that when site visitors resize a browser window, web pages designed in Flash stay in proportion no matter how large or small the browser window becomes. Furthermore, Flash movies are streaming, meaning that when part of a vector image downloads, that part of the image displays on the browser screen although the rest of the movie downloads. Thus, Flash designs have benefits for both web designers and site visitors .

In terms of search engine visibility, however, Flash sites are not an ideal choice. Although a few of the major search engines can crawl the links embedded inside a Flash navigation scheme, the main problem with Flash sites is that they contain very little text for the search engines to index.

Splash Pages

One of the main uses of Flash movies is to use them on a splash page. A splash page is a web page that consists either of (a) a large graphic image and a link instructing visitors to enter a web site or (b) a Flash animation, a link to skip the Flash animation (Skip Intro), and a redirect to a new page after the animation is completed. Many web sites use splash pages as their home page.

Generally speaking, both end users and the search engines do not like splash pages because they contain very little quality content, even though the page design might be outstanding. Using a splash page as a home page is like trying to force all people that visit a supermarket to watch a 30-second commercial before entering a store. For example, Figure 3.11 shows a beautifully designed splash page with a Flash movie.

Figure 3.11. A splash page for the Caliper Technologies site. Even the only text on the page (skip intro) is an image. Note that there is no text for the search engines to index and no links for them to follow.

Viewing this page, you can immediately see multiple reasons why splash pages are not search engine friendly:

• A splash page contains little or no text for the search engines to index: Remember that the most important text on a web page is title-tag text and visible body text that can be copied and pasted into a text editor. This splash page contains no visible body text.

• A splash page contains few or no links for the search engine spiders to follow: Most splash pages link to a single page, which communicates to the search engines that you consider only one page on your site to be important. If JavaScript surrounds a link to an internal page, many search engines will not follow that link.

• Most splash pages contain a redirect after the Flash animation is complete: All the search engines consider redirects to be spam. In fact, most search engines do not include splash pages in their indices because of the lack of content and the redirect.

Important

Always remove the redirect from splash pages. Most search engines do not include in their search engine indices web pages that contain redirects.

One workaround is to add keyword-rich text and links to the splash page. If you want to keep the flair and ambiance of the Flash movie, place the text and links below the fold so that your site visitors have to scroll to view the text. In all likelihood , site visitors will click the Enter Site or Skip Intro button rather than scroll to the bottom of the web page. However, if your site visitors do scroll, the page contains quality content and important links.

One way to determine if a splash page is effective is to design two different home pages:

• A splash page as outlined in Figure 3.12, showing a large Flash movie and keyword-rich text below the fold

  Figure 3.12. By adding keyword-rich text and important links to a splash page, the page becomes more search engine friendly without losing the impact of the Flash movie.

  

• A home page that presents site visitors with keyword-rich text above the fold, without the Flash movie

After analyzing your site's traffic logs for a period of at least three to six months, determine which home page design your visitors prefer. If you find that your target audience prefers the splash page with the Flash movie, keep the Flash movie and the quality content below the fold. If your site visitors do not prefer a less animated home page, continue using the non-Flash page as your home page. Both page designs can attain search engine visibility, but one design probably has a much higher conversion rate than the other.

Regardless of what your target audience prefers, a search engine “ friendly splash page must contain keyword-rich content.

Flash Sites

Some search engines have been able to follow the links inside Flash sites since 2001, and they have become increasingly better at it. In August 2002, FAST Search announced that its spider could index the contents inside a Flash site and follow the links as well, which is great news for Flash designers.

Important

Because the search engines are relatively new at indexing Flash sites, I'll be monitoring the progress of our Flash designs on the search engines and keeping that information posted on this book's companion site at www.searchenginesbook.com/flash.html.

Because Flash sites rarely contain keyword-rich content, enable your site visitors to communicate their preferences by creating both a Flash and HTML version of your web site. On the home page, let your visitors select their preferred design, as SiteLab has done on its home page shown in Figure 3.13.

Figure 3.13. SiteLab's home page contains keyword-rich text for the search engines to index and gives site visitors the choice to view the Flash version or HTML version of the web site.

The main benefit of this type of layout is that the HTML version of the site can attain maximum search engine visibility until all the search engines can support Flash.