Recently I had the unfortunate task of telling a business person some really bad news about her site.

She was asking for some ideas on how to get more visitors to her site as well as making it more visible on Google. I checked out her site which was very nice but I noticed one HUGE problem, it was completely built in flash. Because the site was built in Flash it probably cost her roughly $1000 dollars. The bad news about it being in Flash is that the search engines will only index it as a single page site without any content.

Considering content is one of the most important aspects of SEO if the search engines can’t read it, I don’t care how nice it is, the site will bring minimal traffic, if any.  You can add description tags and title tags that are excellent but because that is not a primary concern with search engines, you will receive minimal benefit from it.

It is true that Google purchased the rights to the technology to interpret Flash. However, they have not implemented it and no other search engine can read it.  When they do implement it, they will only read the text inside the Flash, not pictures of text, since Flash sites are basically moving pictures, Flash sites will still not be as indexable as other sites.

There is NO aesthetic advantage to designing an entire site in Flash. In fact, you can achieve almost the same effects with JavaScript, and CSS, which won’t interfere with search engine indexing.

Flash is great for accents, but not for entire site coding.

I wasn’t really thrilled about telling the person about her site.  Especially since I knew approximately how much she paid for it, but as a web designer I felt I had a moral and ethical duty to tell her.  Was she upset?  Probably, but I haven’t heard a response from her.  My only concern is that she went back and talked to the person who created the site for her, asking them about it.  Not because I am fearful of the backlash but because of the fact that her web designer probably told her I was full of it and that Google and other sites can index her Flash site just as well as any other site.  The reason I am sure that her web designer told her not to worry about it is because they created the site for her to begin with, knowing that her site would have a hard time getting indexed and getting traffic.

Just because a site can have a ton of bells and whistles doesn’t mean it should.  This also goes for advertisements, or anything that does not serve a purpose to your site visitors such as music playing in the background, a video of the site owner/CEO talking about how great their business is or even saying welcome.

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