Frames and Flash

The major search engines, i.e. Yahoo, Google and MSN, will all say the same thing on their web masters pages and that is “some web crawlers have difficulty reading the context of these pages”.

What it doesn’t say is don’t use flash or framed pages because this is a no-no.  The reason why I want to make that clear is a lot of SEO’s will try and tell you that this is a bad thing and that all your pages need to be flat static pages with lots of alt text behind your flat images.  This is not the case.

We have gotten many websites in the top ten and number one spots, some of which use both flash and framed pages. Case in point search “pizza barton” in google and out of the more than three quarters of a million results our site pizzajim.co.uk comes number three (it’s slipped from number one admittedly)

Some do not even have any indexable text or links on the home page.  So how do we do it?  Simple and its something you should be doing anyway. You should have an alternative version of your site which viewers with flash installed will be directed to.  For a framed site, you should also have a non-framed version for people whose browsers don’t support framed pages.  Now that you know how simple it is, here is the temptation.  Because your index page will most likely only be seen by maybe 10% of the people that come to your site, the temptation will be to flood that page with keywords and search text to get yourself bumped up the search and that will happen.  However, when you get caught (which you will), you will be dumped.  This page should only contain a stripped down version of your site and should only contain the same text content as your flash or framed site.

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