Mathieu
Sep 11th, 2006

Adobe Flash is not a friend of Search Engines

Marriott has launched Marriott Virtual Tour which is a new micro-marketing-website. (Sorry for this too short introduction.)

All made with Flash, it has a pretty nice look. Flash is an interesting technology for those who want to put animation on their website. On the other hand, it is not perfect. When we think in terms of search engines, it’s worth nothing else than a big zero. Search engines can’t interprete/index the texts in a Flash animation. In this case, the text is integrated in the Flash animation… and, you’re right, not indexable by search engines, you got it. Graphic design is an important part of websites but it’s not a reason to forget the good practices of web design. It would not be very hard to adapt the concept to make the text “readable” in basic HTML. The designer could have split the page, some of the parts in Flash and the text parts in HTML. As simple as that (for web designers!).

By the way, text-images are not better. On the Check In page the text in this page is an image instead of simple html. There is NO reason why it is like that.

The biggest problem caused by all this is that the website won’t be well ranked in search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), less visitors will get to the website and the return on investment (ROI) will be less than it should/could be.

2 Responses to “Adobe Flash is not a friend of Search Engines”

  1. # Neil MacLeanon 30 Sep 2006 at 11:01 am

    You’re right about flash Matthieu.
    It’s essential to make your text visible to search engines. The other day I surfed over to this PR site (they are organising a conference I am attending) http://www.romanski.co.uk
    View source and you’ll see somebody has done a good job of mixing text and flash. That for me is a happy medium between attractive design and effective SEO.

  2. # Mathieuon 01 Oct 2006 at 9:21 am

    Hi Neil,

    Actually, the text in the source code is in comments. Search engines won’t care about this text so it doesn’t help optimization.

    Take a look at the results in Google : http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=romanski+advertising&spell=1

    There is no text description of what Romanski is… ; )

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