The argument here is about design over substance. I am not saying that good-looking, flashy websites have little to offer their audience. On the contrary, a well-designed website and a good-looking one would actually be remembered more than a website with walls and walls of text. A normal visitor stays in a website that entertains and that just won’t happen with a boring text-based website. However, this text-based website filled to the brim with substantial content and well-placed keywords would most probably rank in top pages of the result pages while the good-looking website will probably never make it to the upper half of the SERPs.

What’s the problem with flash based websites?

The goal of search engines is to give the user the results they’re looking for and the only way it can be done is through analyzing the content. The user inputs a search query and the search engine looks through its index for exact matches in the website’s text. Flash based websites are heavy on images and interactive content. Text is part of graphics so the search engines do not recognize it. What the spiders crawl are code and this complicated language does not match the user’s query. To make things simpler, there is no text in which the search engines could recognize flash content. That is why SEOs do not think highly of flash websites or those that use too much script in their pages.

Search engine optimization is not just an off-page endeavor. For SEO to be fully effective, on-page customization should first be implemented. If the user can’t optimize basic on-page content like page titles and headers then the SEO specialist would have a hard time trying to penetrate search engines. Especially with keyword dependent engines like Yahoo, flash websites would be buried by millions of websites, some even less relevant than the flash website.

Google’s suggestion is to always have a text counterpart of your heavy multimedia laden page. This way search engine spiders can recognize the content and count its relevance to the user’s query. The limitations of the leading search engine can be summarized as follows:

Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript.

• If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

• There are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages.

However since Google is continuously working to improve their search engine, they won’t let such an anomaly just exist. Dedicated to give the best experience to their users, Google and Adobe announced that Google can now crawl and index flash content. However, this just means that your website could be indexed, what this leaves out is your website ranking higher in the SERPs. The measure of relevance and popularity is still through backlinks and keywords.

Until Google finds a way to completely overhaul their algorithm and these flash websites start getting the search engine attention they clearly deserve, the playing field is clear. Once this hurdle is passed though, search engine optimization would be a lot more competitive than it is right now. So it’s time to step up the game while it’s still early.