Google Employee Gives Advice About Best Uses of Flash

We've all been taught that Google is, in essense, a "blind user" and I had heard that it couldn't search for the content contained in Flash, so I have always recommended against using it in page designs. However, I am hearing that Google is making an effort to search Flash content (or at least the content surrounding the flash design), so when I saw Mark Berghausen's post, "The Best Uses of Flash," I was intrigued. He says:

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn't have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.


Berghausen recommends:

1. Using Flash only where needed: This is a recommendation the great usability expert Jacob Nielson has been touting for ages (Check out his article "Flash: 99% bad." I can't recommend his work enough.)


2. Using sIFR for to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements. I disagree here. As a strong advocate of usability, I don't think that bells and whistles like flash or their counterparts should be used for textual elements for a variety of reasons. One is because of the critical nature of those textual elements to search, especially the header. If a designer uses flash or sIFR to display a header it is not likely that they will display that element again as text because in most cases it will not be aesthetically appealing. But this is what needs to be done for that element to be properly picked up for search. Another reason is that a flash element slows down the speed that the page loads. Visitors today have high demands when it comes to viewing pages, and when it takes even a couple moments for a page to view, or worse the page has loaded and another element or elements is still loading, visitors exit. Additionally, as more and more visitors "information snack" having content available in those first few seconds is critical because those visitors especially are guaranteed to stay on your site for only a few moments before going on to another domain.


3. Non-Flash Versions: Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. This recommendation seems to make sense for the designer who absolutely insists on using flash and the developer who is assured that their audience has the hardware and the internet connection to load the page speedily enough that they won't depart because the page loads so slowly they leave as a result. And becayse the page links to HTML deeper on the site SEO remains intact.