Ranking with Flash

If you said to an SEO specialist a year or so ago that you would like to optimise a web site written in Flash then there were two options: i) Rewrite the website as HTML or ii) Forget it. Well now that Google can read Flash files, is it worthwhile using Flash and is there anything we can do to make them rank better?

Google Reads Flash (and so does Yahoo)

It is has recently become possible for Google and Yahoo to read Flash files, so there is some scope to use Flash sensibly, within a website where it can contribute something to the web site. Does this mean that it is okay to let the designers lose with their paint boxes to produce  all singing, all dancing web sites in Flash? Unfortunately, no. There are still limitations which mean that a Flash website cannot be optimised to the same degree as a similar web page written in HTML.

While text and links within Flash can be indexed now many of the elements that can be add to make a HTML page search engine friendly have no analogue in  Flash.  In Flash for example, there is no way of defining what text counts as main headings.  So you can think of a Flash website as being indexed in the same way as if you were limited to writing your pages using only links and paragraph tags. In this light, it is clear that Flash and HTML sites cannot be optimised in the same way.  The full extent of what can be read can be found at Google Webmaster Central Blog.
External links are also read, but it is hard to see how internal links within the same page would be indexed as in a Flash site they will point to the same page. The other major player in the search engine trio, Live does not index Flash yet so if you write a site in Flash you will be at a slight disadvantage even though Live does not have a significant share of the search engine market.

If you must use Flash, then it is better to embed it in a web page.  It can be embedded to comply with standards using a JavaScript wrapper. Using swfobject, the Flash can be embedded and has the added benefit of being able to replace the Flash with some indexable content in the event that the Flash cannot be summoned up.

Embedding the Code

To embed the Flash the following code will work, first you need to call the Javascript. Place, the follow within the section of the page.

Next, the wrapper:

The required arguments for SWFObject are:

• swf – The file path and name to your swf file.
• id – The ID of your object or embed tag. The embed tag will also have this value set as it’s name attribute for files that take advantage of swliveconnect.
• width – The width of your Flash movie.
• height – The height of your Flash movie.
• version – The required player version for your Flash content. This can be a string in the format of ‘majorVersion.minorVersion.revision’. An example would be: “6.0.65″. Or you can just require the major version, such as “6″.
• background-colour – This is the hex value of the background colour of your Flash movie.

Optional arguments are:

• quality – The quality you wish your Flash movie to play at. If no quality is specified, the default is “high”.
• xiRedirectUrl – If you would like to redirect users who complete the ExpressInstall upgrade, you can specify an alternate URL here
• redirectUrl – If you wish to redirect users who don’t have the correct plug-in version, use this parameter and they will be redirected.
• detectKey – This is the URL variable name the SWFObject script will look for when bypassing the detection. Default is ‘detectflash’. Example: To bypass the Flash detection and simply write the Flash movie to the page, you could add

  ?detectflash=false

  to the url of the document containing the Flash movie.

The Javascript will not pass XHTML validation but it can be placed within <[![CDATA tags to solve this problem.

Summary

I still wouldn’t use Flash for a whole website because of its limited scope for optimisation. However, where it provides additional functionality for the user, it can be used with SWFObject.js to  create a  web standards compliant page with the added advantage of being able to add hidden content for non-Flash users.