Does Flash Affect my Website Rankings?

A common scenario:

My developer has created a very beautiful website with pure flash, I am worried if its going to affect my rankings and will it have any any indexation issues?

Although Google can index flash content up to some extent still there are chances that the flash page is not going to rank high in search results.

Problem with Flash Pages

As the search engines are text based so they find it difficult to index a page which is totally flash based. Therefore if your webpage is pure flash search engine won't be able to see 95% of your webpage content.

Google has passed various official statements regarding Flash content

"Search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. [...] Any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won't be accessible to search engines. [...]

We recommend that you use rich-media technologies like Flash primarily for decorative purposes, and instead use HTML for content and navigation."

"Make sure that your site has a reasonable, seamless experience for visitors without Flash. This may involve creating HTML-only equivalents for your Flash-based content that will automatically be shown to visitors who can't view Flash."

Use of noscript tag

Google's John Mueller indicates that "One of the problems with noscript is - as others have mentioned - that it's been abused quite a bit by spammers, so search engines might treat it with some suspicion.

So if this is really important content, then I wouldn't rely on all search engines treating your noscript elements in the same way as normal, visible, static content on your pages."


Takeaways for your website:

• Avoid using much flash, use it for decorative purpose only.
• The main content of the webpage should be available as simple text.
• Use regular HTML href links for navigation. Links in the JavaScript or flash navigation menu are hard to be parsed by the search engines.