SEO Friendly Flash Technique or Cloaking Method? - SWFobject.js

Many big brand sites rely on flashy designs to try to capture their audience. The problem as we all know is that Flash can’t be crawled effectively and spidered by search engines. They might pick up a few links, but not much that will help. Bummer right?  

All of a sudden Flash agencies and designers start throwing out the SWFObject.js solution. This is a JavaScript function that will contain text within a Div Layer and display it if someone doesn’t have Flash installed by adding crawlable text for search engines to index. Web developers will argue that the SWFobject is a valid alternative for websites to get past this Flash crawling issue. The arguments for using this Object is that as long as the information presented in these hidden DIV layers are identical to the text in Flash, there is no problem at all and search engines will not penalize the website.

The thing is, if reported, how confident is an SEO that their website won’t be banned for using this, even if using identical text? With frequent updates and facelifts to any site throughout the year, especially a big brand website, it could eventually turn into a less knowledgable person inserting a “harmless” keyword here, or a keyword there, not thinking much of it or understanding the consequence. As we know, one of Google’s commandments says that all content on an HTML page should be visible to users. 

Google engineer Matt Cutts nor any other search engine representative have not made any direct comments about it (that I could find at least). This only gets me thinking, if you are an SEO consultant or firm out there, is it safe to approve or suggest the use of this SWFObject.js when this hasn’t been directly discussed. Is it responsible, if you are a paid consultant for a company, to recommend using this object? I would take the safer route, unless I found information that said otherwise, especially if it wasn’t a website I owned. But then again, is it okay to just build everything in Flash now using this technique?

May 22nd, 2007 Posted by Frank Antonellis | Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing | one comment