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Google announces flash indexing
We all knew it was coming! On the 28th of June, Google announced that they have released an algorithm to effectively rank flash based websites and content.
Great, bring on a new era of flash websites
Hold your horses, there is still major draw backs with using flash on your website.
- Accessibility - Unfortunately people with visual disabilities will still have trouble seeing a flash site. There is a lot of aided technology on the market which converts an html page into an audible format, or a text only reader which allows users to increase font size unfortunately these do not work with flash sites, so it is best practice to still offer an HTML alternative to a flash version of the site. Furthermore., under the 1995 Discrimination act by offering an inaccessible site could be deemed against the law.
- Some people just don’t like flash! - Whether it is because they have a slow connection speed, or they just like reading the content without all the bells and whistles, offering an html version is still important.
- No Semantic Mark-up - To simplify this, semantic mark-up is breaking the page up into the main title of the page, sub headers, and paragraphs. Google uses this to rank the relevancy of words on the page. For example Google will assume the main title of the page has the most relevant words in it. Flash does not have the ability to break up the content into relevancy, and as such this will affect Google rankings.
- Google does not attach content from external files called by the flash site - Content managed flash sites usually allow you to update text and images through an xml file, or similar file types. If Google does not read the external content, then all content managed flash sites are still not able to be ranked. Most large flash sites, pull their data from xml and html files, so this improvement in Google’s algorithm has little benefit for them.
- Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript - So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
When should you use flash?
Flash penetration in the UK is well over 99%, and as such it is the perfect vehicle to deliver rich media such as videos, and interactive user interfaces.
The good news
We’ve all seen them, flash intros and fancy navigation… With Google’s previous algorithm, quite often only the homepage of a site could be indexed. With the new algorithm hopefully all the pages within the site should be indexed.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
