flash vs html website?

for all of those that do not use flash because web crawlers/search engines can 'read' the content.... you have

one less reason to avoid using a flash website...

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/01/AR2008070100007.html

Still not there. The very last bit of the article tells the most important part of the tale:

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<i>But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are

not likely to appear at the top of many search results.</i>

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While Google may be able to index SWF files, what they can't do is treat a Flash files like a collection of individually

addressable pages (for the same reason that someone who's just spent five minutes clicking their way through pages

in a Flash gallery wrecks the whole thing just by clicking their brower's 'back' button). Let's say it takes three

mousclicks on a Flash object to cause a certain layer of text to pop up (like, your wedding pricing). It's very unlikely

that Google will be able to land an external link right into the middle of a sequence of actions that will render a

complex Flash presention that will appear in a particular state. It might take a dozen different bits of user interaction

to cause a Flash object to show up in a certain way. Tying a cacheable Google search result to an actionable URL

that puts a new visitor into the middle of that Flash object in a certain state... nope. Web designers will have to

expressly build sites with that in mind. And ALL-Flash sites can't do that - there has to be a larger framework in

which Flash objects are embedded.

Matt, excellent points. Thanks for taking the time to explain this. Sure enough following the announcement, we started hearing excited cries of "this changes everything!" Um, no. Not so much.

"But until Adobe makes it easy for the average Webmaster or blogger to link deeply into those Flash files, they are not likely to appear at the top of many search results. "

 

That statement itself is flawed in that many, many flash only websites appear at the top of many search results.

 

I can think of a lot of photographers who make 6 figures a year and use flash only websites. Something must be working for them, there might be just as many with html websites - I don't know for sure though.

L E: You're missing the point. The web site as a whole may, indeed, appear thusly. But I'll bet you that they are NOT "Flash only." There is other HTML there, including title text, meta tags, etc. Regardless: what cannot appear at the top of a Google search would be a functioning link into a page "within" a Flash object, unless that page is, essentially, something you can point to with a unique URL - which means Flash embedded on an HTML framework page. All you have to do to prove the truth of this is to find the Flash-heaviest site you can, drive around inside an all-Flash gallery, and then try to bookmark, say, page 3 of 10 of those images. If you can, and can revisit it later, it's because you're NOT seeing an all-Flash site.

 

And if you can bookmark it, then Google can, too, and always has been. But if the URL never changes as you drive around someone's web site, then any bookmark you make within that site will only ever return you to the main page. If you shoot weddings and corporate events, but have your home page set up to show off weddings during the wedding hiring season, THAT's what someone who clicked on your corporate info link at Google will end up seeing, based on the new stuff that's referred to in the article. You can't deep link into a Flash object, not gracefully. It's not a mystery or anything. All we're going to see is Google noticing what's IN the Flash object, but then sending you to the top of the site.

 

It's just like the notes you see here... "I've just been to so-and-so's web site, and she does beautiful wedding photography. How does she do those ring shots? I can't link you to it, but if you go to her home page, click weddings, then click recent, and then roll your mouse over the name 'Jones' and then go to the third gallery down, and click the spinning thumbnail thing, you'll see about fifty pictures... I'm talking about the 23rd one, like halfway down the page."

 

Google can't DO that. All they can do is hand you a link. And unless each Flash powered area of a site has a unique URL, all links will dump you in the same place.

show me a photographers flash site with any decent ammount of text content, and we will then BEGIN to figure out how that site can be read by a search enging spider. If there is a minimal ammount to read, there is nothing for (text based) google to chew on

Flash websites are the scourge of the internet. It's way overused, and breaks a lot of normal navigation. If you must use it, use it for small, specific things within a larger html site. Don't fall into the trap of using flash just because you can.

A much better reason to avoid flash (than simply not being indexed by SE's) is : A large # of users are using dial-up. They WILL not wait for flash to load.

If you can't show the customer a site that works (on their computer) - Customer may question your abilities?

 

my 2 cents

 

KP

The new tools that Adobe is working on will actually parse the content that is held within the .swf file. This is already happening, and today's announcement just legitimized the technique and thus, Adobe will develop tools for Flash optimization tools that makes it that much easier.

 

But we win one battle and lose another. Consider a large Flash website that doesn't have any content in the .swf file, hrmmm? Bad boy, bad boy, watcha gonna do when the crawlers come for you if the content is actually stored in a database backend, and there is no content to be indexed in the .swf file because it's all generated dynamically using calls to the database?

 

We don't have answers or solutions to this yet, at least without resulting to cloaking content. But let's give Adobe and Google some time, I think eventually we will have the best of both worlds and achieve the utopian view of SEO for Flash.

I'm not aware of any Flash sites that are not wrapped around with some html. Anybody here expecting their site to float to the

top of a google search?

Regardless of whether or not the SWF contains the indexable stuff that will generate good Googleranking, the real issue will continue to be the fact that you can't deep link or bookmark (or send a targeted link in e-mail) unless you break the site up into something that provides for unique URLs for every part of the site. That's just now how Flash does things, and if you create a hightly fragmented HTML-based site with the some Flash stuff embedeed throughtout in that granular a way, you've just about killed off any reason to be using Flash in the first place.

It's a good thing you don't work for Adobe or Google, Matt :P

For those who care, I urge you not to get excited about stuff like this. Ignore Flash wherever possible and use the standards that all web browsers can use natively. Flash is just not 'kosher'. YMMV.

http://www.syncmyride.com is a good case sudy. Flash has come of Age, as demonstrated by adoption rate such as Ford, Hollywood movie sites (take note), and is installed in 98% of the Web browsers. Those who don't have broadband or don't have Flash are likely not my target demographic as far as marketing/sales is concerned, anyways. GenX and GenY are those who are (mostly) getting married these days, whether they actually pay for the photographer or their (baby booming) parents do it's the bride and sometimes the groom who's heart/mind you must capture to close the deal, and Flash has the potential for far greater impact than non-flash sites. Most Gen Ys who grew up with the Internet (I'm placing my bets) have and use Flash in their daily lives, so there is no significant risk of using Flash for portfolios IMHO.

Just to be clear, though: the problem we're talking about here is that there is readable text in that Flash Object (say, the sub-page that talks about "Ringtone Support"), and Google may - given the new tools that they're working with Adobe to use - even slurp up that string of text and index it. You might even hit Google, type in that phrase, and at some point Google will return a result related to that web site. The problem? Google has no way of actually linking you to the area of that web site that talks about "Ringtone Support." The URL to which they link you for that is no different than the URL for the main area of that Flash content, or any OTHER area of that Flash content. Visitors would have to click around until they've found what they're looking for, if they can even find it.

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The lack of the ability to provide useful links into content is what's going to keep such pages very low, in terms of Google rank. Whether or not the ability to find such pages does, or does not matter for a particular business model is a separate discussion. But if it DOES matter, then the new tools discussed in the original post will NOT get the web site owner any useful new traffic related to a particular search. Or, they'll have to re-engineer their entire site so that the Flash content people DO land on is somehow relevent to the visitor no matter what they were searching on, and not matter what part of the overall site it was that caused Google to return a result. And there's no way to build a web site that's useful to all visitors under those circumstances.

Hey Matt, I can appreciate that you are trying to make your point heard, but somewhere there is a misunderstanding and I won't perpetuate further confusion by commenting further on your post. Please touch base offline if you can, or would like to discuss this some more. I suspect there are some work arounds to the problem you are describing, as outlined here http://tinyurl.com/4eujjc, but if you are a glass half-empty kind of person as I suspect you are, and you are taking the philosophical (as opposed to the technical) argument to the nth degree, then you won't find any Flash SEO techniques that actually meet your expectations and consequently you are just being a curmudgeon about using Flash at all and that attitude, frankly, won't be helpful to anybody reading this thread.

I don't understand why most photographers would want deep links. Most photo web sites don't have a lot of unique internal content, other than linking to galleries, "about me" and contact info, I don't see any need for deep linking. It's simple enough to put this info in a splash page that mixes html and flash.

Actually, Steven, it's not philosophical at all, ever (other than, philosophically, I think it's a good thing for photographers to use the web to grow their business). This is strictly technical. As in the example you cited (syncmyride.com), considerable language about products and services is exposed as you navigate around within the web site. The URL you are looking at doesn't change as you do so. That means that a given block of text, perhaps containing the exact thing that someone is looking for when they do a Google search, is NOT something that they can click on a Google search result and simply see. The web site you mention is a perfect example of that.

 

Obviously there are work-arounds. But it means completely re-designing Flash-heavy sites around that reality, and just about every Flash-based site template for sale online or likely to be used on behalf of small businesses setting up a web site at a tolerable budget level will not be built from lots of individually-addressable pages embedding parameterized or stand-alone SWFs. Perhaps that will change, but that's not the prevailing design approach, especially on the content frameworks that most photographers purchase.

 

My point is that the original post here suggests that because Google can now slurp in SWFs and lift the readable text, that people who use Flash to build their business web sites now have "one less reason" not to. I find that to be way too sound-bitish and to be glossing over the substantial dev efforts one would need to take into account. Sites that are built to be addressable will work better, sites that are not built that way will not. The question (as Jeff says) is whether or not a given photography business's communications will benefit from deep linking - it's as simple as that. If you do event photography, and have text describing the event being rendered out through a larger umbrella SWF, people searching for the event's name on Google might now start to find it, but can't be delievered to that specific area of the web site. For some businesses, that's a bad thing - and the "fix" described in the article doesn't address it. Only site design issues address it, breaking the site up into chunks.

 

You and I both know that many people, especially on a tighter budget, will see the original comment or similar articles and digest it as "Cool! Now that Google indexes Flash, I don't have to do that whole site rebuild I've been putting off," or, as they shop around for templates, "Hmmm.. this one looks easy, and I just read that Google will crawl all my galleries now even if I use Flash, so now it's a no-brainer," etc.

 

I'm not a glass-half-empty guy. I just don't like over simplifications of things that aren't actually simple, especially when it ends up costing people money they weren't planning on spending, or costs them business they thought they'd generate - all because of the sugar-coating that a lot of semi-technical reporting does.

I happen to like html based photo galleries more than flash based ones, for the many reasons stated here.

 

Here's a somewhat related question. I like the flash based gallery templates in CS3, which show a group of

thumbnails and one enlargement all in one page. But the html based templates don't do that. Can a CS3 html based

template be "customized" to work like a flash based one?

Its abit of a feedback loop. If folks dont like how you site acts; they will move on!<BR><br>One might add a cool web feature and it looks fine on your new 8 core liquid Nitrogen cooled box with Vista; IE with DNA flash/html features, a cable modem. If it loads slow; bogs, hangs up, ask for upgrades on anothers settup; you dont care; since you have no goals; no customer base defined.:) Thus the folks who stumble upon a site that acts weird;slow; bogs; they move on to anothers that doesnt waste their time. You dont care since it loads well on your box; and you can afford to loose business since the economy is booming.:) Add the most oddball stuff to your site; make each page heck 10 megs; since bandwidth is free. Add features that reduce the number of folks who stay in your site; make it not work on Firefox, Opera, etc. :)<BR><BR>With a DEFINED business one can figure if new fangled features make sense. Are the images for old 1940's Ford 8N tractor parts with customers in their 70's on dialup in podunk; or is it for the iPhone for ordering pizzas in NYC? Is the site to sell giant fine art prints of rare sunsets, rare kids soccer images; rare cat images?:)<BR><BR>

With this box I am on now it mostly works ok with sites that have flash; but sometimes one gets a message like below: I was just trying to order some parts.<BR><BR><BR><BR><img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/ektar/desktop/flash.gif?t=1215377332">