SEO on a Flash site is like modding a chav car

We 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 visible.

Now – you are of course able to perform SEO on a website built in Flash. For starters, you could engage in a fierce link building campaign, amassing thousands of high quality links from relevant websites. This isn’t cheap however, and it often entails a recurring cost as your links need to be topped up to keep you ahead of your competition.

You could also create a HTML section of your website, using the same content as contained in your Flash website, so that Google (and those discerning enough to not want to use Flash) can access it.

You can create satellite sites, utilise social networking and all manner of advanced SEO techniques – but to be perfectly honest, no matter how much time, effort and money you spend on your SEO, your website will still suffer from its basic limitations… it’s built in Flash.

It’s the same as modding a chav car to make it look like a fast car. You can spend thousands on the bodywork, adding spoilers, creating a very expensive paint job, fine tuning the engine and working on the breaks but, at the end of the day, it’s still a cheap hatchback. It will never beat a car that has been built specifically for the job at hand, and it will probably cost you a lot more in the long run as well.

This is where SEO and car modding run very fine parallels. No matter what you’ve spent on the SEO of a site built in Flash, it will never beat a website that has been built specifically with SEO in mind – and by that we mean regular content, fine tuned for the needs of the end user.