No need to get flash
I posted this on oonagi, but thought it interesting enough to post here:
I do think that flash has a purpose, especially in sites that where it’s more important to have strong visual features, like band sites. For example, neverestsongs.co.uk is undeniably beautiful. But when we look at that instance, you cannot say that it is crawlable by seach engines. Yes, there are methods to ensure that search engines can index the pages, for example giving a site an HTML base and using flash for progressive enhancement (check to see if user can play flash), or alternatively using meta data to include keywords and content.
Perhaps we should take neverestsongs as an example. When we check the source code (ctrl+u) afters going directly to the site we see that: a) the only meta data there is is the keywords: ‘music, luke, twyman, kent, england, english, uk’ b) it is displayed within a frame, with the actual site being stored on whitevinyldesign.com/newnnev, a page without any further content for search engines to crawl
So far as search engine optimisation goes, both these (very good looking) sites are not being indexed properly by search engines… or so the common belief goes. Still, with a little digging you will find that Google does index flash pages! Apparently they use a search engine indexer provided by Adobe (the owners of flash) which they can use (though one would guess they have to front up some hard cash). You still have to be careful how you build your page and should check it against Adobe’s swf2html output but you can now rest a little easier that you will show up in search results, well, google’s search results. A quick search on flash and seo will yield a wealth of information.
Now, is flash the industry standard? I am certain that it is for creative industries but I did feel the need to check the top 10 global websites to see how much they used flash. For this I used Alexa.com, and checked their global rankings. Of the top five sites (Yahoo, YouTube, Windows Live, Google and MySpace) at least some use flash, but they only use it as embedded players with XHTML sites. Funnily enough, this drops of dramatically as you go through the rankings of the top twenty. So the big players do use flash, but its sporadic and only as a small part of their site. If you look through their code though they seem to be doing all their fancy eye-candy with javascript (facebook make extensive use of javascript, as do google).
So here is my conclusion. So far as problems caused for search engines, this isn’t the issue it always used to be. You still need to take a little care but it’s certainly not something for a client to be concerned about. My other question, is it the industry standard? That depends on what kind of site you want. For the large sprawling behemoths it clearly isn’t appropriate, else they would be making far more extensive us of it. If you’re in creative industries (like a band, or an artist) and you want a good site that captures your audience, then flash is the way to go.