Altogether now… Flash a-ah – Saviour of the Universe!
Ah, Flash Gordon. One of the best comic book movies ever made (and we’ll have words with anyone that says otherwise) but while Flash may have been able to score touchdowns for fun, defeat the mighty Ming the Merciless and save the earth, he was never that good at SEO.
Yes, the hunky New York Jets quarterback was a hero, but when it comes to getting your website found in Google, Flash just lets you down – badly.
You see, Flash looks good (as we can see clearly) and he’s very interactive, with lots of moving parts and buttons to press, but Google doesn’t even know he’s there.
We are of course talking about Macromedia Flash (or Adobe Flash now, thanks to the great takeovers) and its use on websites. Flash is very popular among some web designers because their really are no limits with what you can do – much like Flash Gordon himself. However, as far as SEO is concerned, the effect of Flash is the exact opposite – there really is very little you can do.
All too often we see websites that have been made entirely from Flash, websites that are beautiful to look at, fun to navigate and are quite simply works of art. But as with all art, the purpose of it can become lost – at least as far as the search engines are concerned. You see, Google needs to see text. It needs to see regularly updated content, and lots of it. Flash has none of this.
We’re not saying don’t use Flash in your web design, far from it. You just need to use Flash as ‘part’ of your
website design, rather than design your website out of Flash.
OK, let’s all sing along together…
He’s for everyone of us
Stand for everyone of us
He save with a mighty hand
Every man every woman
Every chill-he’s a mighty – Flash!
I love flash, it was so good when it first came out.
[...] wrote a post recently about how Flash (Gordon) was very bad for SEO in the sense that Flash websites are difficult for Google to index and their content isn’t as [...]