People often ask us why we don’t do more flash animation in our site – “It’s soooo cool!”
The simple answer is: search engines don’t index flash content correctly.
The advanced answer is: most search engines index your site using spiders or robots.
What are robots and spiders? They are programs written to crawl through your site following links within your site and to other sites that you link to.
What’s the big deal about that? The big deal is there is a problem with spiders and ‘bots. They can only follow links and they can’t submit forms. This means if there is content in your site that requires a login then the spiders can’t index it – and if they can’t index it then they can’t include it in their search engine. A lot of sites use programming that uses “?” or “&” in the URL. These are considered stop characters and some search engines can’t access pages that use these.
But what about Flash animation? ‘bots and spiders have the same problems with flash animation. The links within flash aren’t really links – they are flash code to load a new movie or a new scene. Most spiders and ‘bots see a flash page as ONE page – not multiples so they only index the main content. This decreases your page count dramatically.
What about Flash intros? Search engines LOVE the first page of your site – if there is no text there to index they might not index your site at all AND you should always have textual/html links on your flash intro page to be certain the spiders can index your site if they are stymied by Flash.
What can be done about stop characters and Flash? Easy – don’t use them or embed your flash in your page instead of making all of your pages Flash-based. Use smaller movies to accent your site.
But what if I have to use stop characters in my programming? Then use .htaccess redirects or other methods to make them clean urls.
What is a clean URL? Well, instead of http://www.visionaryweb.com/myprogram.php?somevalue you could use .htacess to write that link as: http://www.visionaryweb.com/myprogram/somevalue – search engines like clean url’s without stop characters.
How do you do that? It is not terribly difficult and Visionary can help you make decisions for your site on whether to use Flash or not and when to use redirects to provide clean URLs to the search engines.
Give us a call or email sales@visionaryweb.com today to get started!
We can also provide a complete site audit of your web site that will help you in determining what you can do to improve your chances with the search engines.
