Flash animation on home page - will this harm my rankings?

[djdavejones]

Hi all,

A while back I added a flash animation to our site pages (through use of a common template). Worryingly, this seemed to coincide with some fairly dramatic drops in our rankings for some of our major search terms.

I later modified the embedding technique to follow SEO friendly ways of embedding flash. Thankfully, this then seemed to coincide with a return to form for our major keywords.

So my question is, even though the initial problem has passed, is there any evidence to suggest that adding flash content to a page can harm either your current rankings or be detrimental to your future rankings? i.e. would the best idea be to remove it altogether?

thanks,

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dave
promotional usb drives

 

[iamlijo]

it wont hurt seo rankings

 

[satch]

There is some quite good info on this on the SEOmoz blog. These should help:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/flash-now-searchable-isnt-it
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/flash-and-seo-compelling-reasons-why-search-engines-flash-still-dont-mix
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/whenhow-you-can-get-by-with-a-full-flash-site

 

[david rushton]

A flash banner should not damage your rankings. Basing an entire website around Flash probably would, but not if it is used just as a banner.

 

[TotallySport]

A flash banner wont affect results, unless it has replaced something which was indexed and regarded highly from the search engines, and nothing was compensated for the removal.

 

[Coderea]

Addition or Removal of Flash content doesn'e effect SERP's until/unless you are looking to develop and convert it to a full flash based website.!

 

[AndyBlack]

It's best not to have too much flash on your site. Google can't read flash content so it can't be certain of what's on there. I tend to stay clear of flash now.

Just ensure that any important info that is contained within your flash is also within your contextual content somewhere. Content that can be crawled.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Not enough information really. Was adding the flash element the ONLY thing you did? Did you for example remove some text that was there and replace it with the flash? The method of embedding it can harm rankings, if page load times are slow then that will lower your google trust value.

One thing though, it is a misconception that google can't read flash, google can read flash movies, but they look at them as a page apart, and also as one single page of content. Google can pull urls out and add them to their 'to do' list of urls, but they can not apply any link benefit through the flash movie. So as there is no link benefit ie no target, no anchor text etc, just aplain old url, it is unlikely the link will get spidered (unless the content is 100% unique).

You can add no script content to the flash movie, which should be whatever is in the movie (including links).

So the answer is that it appears cause and effect have been confused in your experience. Like everything, it is not the materials that are to blame, it might well be the execution and the methodology used!

 

[An Oasis]

...google can read flash movies...

Just to add G can/does read static text but does not read/index dynamically generated text, i.e. text produced via action script.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Yep, agreed, and it is this sort of thing that makes it impossible to make a statement of fact with regard an individual case of flash use