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We recently had an enquiry from a major UAE manufacturer about their new, recently launched website design in Abu Dhabi.  The management at the company, loved the richness of the graphics and the animations, but were at a loss as to why their brand new website could not be found by major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.  We checked their site and immediately noticed that their entire website had been built in Flash.

Flash based websites are somewhat of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they provide a useful medium for generating rich & often-impressive multi-media content, but on the other, in their purest form are useless for search engine recognition & therefore optimisation.

Dubai based digital and SEO consultants such as Acumen Interactive have long cautioned against designing sites purely in Flash, an application that can generate graphically appealing website designs, but that are largely invisible to Search Engines. Google recently stated that they could now index Flash files but there has been little or no change in Google’s search results for Flash based websites. Despite saying they can now index text & links contained within SWF files it seems they still can’t recognize text appearing in a picture. That includes FLV files such as videos.  Since a pure Flash website only contains images & other multimedia, the only text Google’s indexing bot is likely to find are text strings such as loading. That’s certainly not going to give any actual indication of what content a specific site contains.  Furthermore, Google still has trouble with some JavaScript files, which means if a particular site contains a lot of Flash based content and JavaScript, the search engines may well still have a lot of difficulty finding & indexing sites such as these.  SEO in Flash is very difficult to accomplish. It’s fine & possibly even desirable to make use of Flash elements in web design, for example banners, but one should continue to keep away from self-contained Flash websites. The main reasons being as follows:

Flash doesn’t use regular HTML tags to format sections of text. That being the case, how would a search engine know what’s important & what’s not on any particular page or section of a site? Sometimes Flash designers use cool text effects such as animating individual letters in a word.  Search engines can only understand words, not a bunch of individual letters.

It is difficult to separate the textural content into clearly defined sections.

A flash website usually contains the whole content for the site on one URL.  That makes it difficult to target specific keywords on specific pages, unlike regular HTML pages. It also means Flash sites cannot get in-bound links to specific sections of the site, only to the home page. Then there is the issue of deep linking. Flash sites are comprised of files that are linked from other Flash files, rather than other sites. This lack of inbound deep links makes it difficult to get high rankings for content within the site.

Flash sites are unable to utilise basic search engine optimisation (SEO) such as optimised title tags, heading tags or keyword-focused text links. This means they must heavily depend on inbound links to lift rankings. With all these restrictions it is still preferable to keep away from Flash sites & only use Flash elements when necessary. In case you must use Flash, make positive use of the text & links from the Flash file in an HTML version. Flash was seldom designed with search engines in mind & despite improvements in how the engines read the files; you will ALWAYS be at a disadvantage in the search engine rankings.  In summary Flash is much harder to optimize than HTML.

And further more recent announcements by Adobe – makers or Flash have recently announced that they will no longer develop Flash platforms for mobile and tabs.

To discuss your new Dubai website design or Abu Dhabi website design project why not contact us for a detailed look at our portfolio.