SEO & Flash

How to SEO Flash » by Jonathan Hochman

It says that you should create html pages and put a flash movie on them because it would make it spiderable to search engines.

Basically you can't SEO a flash site because search engines can't read the text (for the most part). So the only option is as "internet" posted o create a mixture of flash and html.

You can absolutely have flash on your site and rank well. Just don't use the flash to provide 'site wide links'. Most SEO guys actually use flash to link to pages like the 'contact us' page or other non important pages. This is how they sculpt page rank and control the flow throughout their site.

You can still SEO a full flash site but only off-site SEO, though it will be extra difficult compared to HTML based sites.

I suppose you could include the content in the flash file, from external files. These should then be shown to search engines, and people who don't have flash installed.

Its called server-side includes, and they can be used effectively for this as well. You should make sure that the actual content is viewable without flash. Another way to do this, would be to only use flash for animated elements on your page.

Flash in combination with JavaScript is not really an ideal solution. We need the search engines to index the sites, just like they would index a normal HTML page.

But how would you do that? Flash lacks the structure of a html page, to organize the content. There is no question about it hurts SEO. You can however still design around these cases, there is no-one who forces you to build your site entirely in flash, and its rarely needed anyway.

Unless you want the backgrounds to be animated. But why would you wan't that? Its bad for readability.

Ok to answer the question. Yes there are ways to "SEO" a flash site, but unless you make use of server-side programming, or the messy alternative with JavaScript, then its going to be very diffucult to rank well on your keywords.

The best way as it stands currently, is not to make to much use of flash. You can still embed it for headers, footers, borders. Or whatever you want animated, you just shouldn't use it for the sites content. But then again, why would you? What advantage/benefits would it give to build your site entirely in flash?


The mentioned article speaks of a method which allows you to display both the content in the HTML, as well as in the flash file, without risking that your site be tagged for cloaking of its content. Because SEs currently don't pharse JavaScript, they could however do in the future, so relying on this method is really security by obscurity.

Its generally a very messy method, which i wouldn't recommend to anyone.

Yes, these days it is possible. If you have a flash based website make sure to do proper seo. Just Google for the ways and you will get to know how to do that.