What is a Flash Site?

How to recognize a Flash site

Macromedia's Flash is a web development tool that allows designers to incorporate full animation, vector based graphics and sound into their sites. While it's a wonderful creative tool, it's presents a real problem for search engines, and therefore, search engine optimization. The biggest drawback to a full flash site is that all the content that could be crawled by a search engine is locked in the Flash file format, which is inaccessible to a search engine spider. (For more on this, read about the Invisible Web)

Here are some ways to determine if your site is a Flash Site:

• When the site loads, there's usually an animated "loading" message

• Drag your cursor over the web page. If it's a Flash site, rather than highlighting individual parts of the page, you won't be able to highlight the Flash section at all.

• Right click somewhere over the page. Rather than the usual options, you'll be given the Flash pop up menu, with the commands "play, loop, rewind, forward and back".

If your site is a full flash site, it's basically invisible to search engines (and anyone that doesn't have the Flash plug in). For this reason, your designer may have provided a "non flash" alternative. While this allows search engines to index the site, it still creates a number of problems in building reciprocal link popularity. Or, the designer may have confined the Flash to a self contained Flash banner on the page, surrounded by other HTML components. From a positioning perspective, the second option is far more preferable.