Most of the time, Flash becomes web designers’ favorite platform for developing a website, and it doesn’t take an Internet geek to know the reasons why it does.
Yep, a well-designed Flash website never fails to create an immediate – and lasting – impression on its visitors: It’s graphically enticing, it’s highly interactive and it’s fun to play with.
But, (oh yeah, here comes the ‘but’!) no matter how amazing your Flash website looks, it’s not exactly SEO-friendly, and you got to be a bit of an Internet geek to know the reasons why it is:
One URL, and one URL only
Each time you click a link in the Flash site, you are taken to another page, but the URL doesn’t change. Search engines use the URL as an indicator of page content, so if the URL doesn’t change, how the heck are the search engines supposed to know what the content is about?
(Much) longer load time
Probably the most significant disadvantage of Flash-based web design is that its content takes too long to load. Flash components such as videos, games, animation and background sound make the site much more appealing, but in turn, they increase the loading time.
Websites that take too much time to load normally rank poorly in the SERPs, remember?
Uncrawlability
All text elements in Flash are integrated into the animation, and just like the crawlers’ inability to read images, search engines are unable to read them. Even if your Flash content is properly organized based on its topic, importance, and category, it’s still uncrawlable.
Now, ‘uncrawlable’ may rhyme with ‘incredible’, but in terms of SEO, it just isn’t.
