I recently did a post on Flash and SEO, discussing how search engines (primarily Google so far) are now crawling and indexing Flash.  The bottom line was that while Flash is still not really SEO-friendly despite recent advancements, there are very good reasons to use Flash in many cases, and there are some excellent techniques to help sites that use Flash to get good SEO rankings.

One of the techniques for helping pages that use Flash to rank well is the use of “swfobject”.

swfobject is basically a JavaScript loader for Flash.  It provides some important benefits for users, such as detecting support for Flash, version compatibility checking, support for downloadingFlash updates, and graceful support for showing alternate content to users who don’t have Flash.  It is designed to work well with all major browsers. (more…)

There has been a lot of discussion and debate lately about the use of Flash on websites in the context of SEO.  The discussion was intensified last June when Google announced (again) that they had improved their support for crawling and indexing Flash content.

The conventional wisdom (and my personal opinion) is that if you are really focusing on SEO, and that is a high priority, Flash is still not way to go, for a variety of reasons discussed below.  However, there are many great reasons to use Flash, so you can’t just dismiss it. Flash is very effective for showing video, interactive applications and other rich media, and it just does things you can’t do with regular old HTML.

From a practical standpoint for many website, the question is not using Flash or not, but rather how to best use Flash on a website to meet user objectives, and still have that website work well for SEO.

Why is Flash an issue for SEO?

Flash presents some challenges for search engines, since most search engines have little or no ability to read and index content within Flash files as effectively as they can with HTML/CSS.  Flash files are not structured to present content directly, but are rather more like a program or script.  The information is structured for execution, not presentation.  This makes it much harder to process and interpret Flash from the perspective of a search engine. (more…)

Google will be officially announcing later today the ability for Google Analytics to track various metrics in flash applications.

I have included a demonstration by Google and Sprout:

With tracking engagement of Flash applications/widgets, this can open up new avenues of paying advertisers for using Flash widgets instead of traditional “pay per click” and “pay per view” models.

Nicholas Abramovic