Recently I was reading part of SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible by Jerri L. Ledford.

In Chapter 3 in the Understanding Usability section he hits on something I think is absolutely correct. If you’ve read much of the Nutlog at all you’ll know I’m not a huge Flash fan. Used in the right place (showing movies, i.e. YouTube) it serves it’s purpose, but in 99% of the cases I’d say it’s abused. Mr. Ledford makes the following point.

“Web-site users are impatient. They don’t like to wait for pages to load, they don’t want to deal with Flash graphics or JavaScript, and they don’t want to be lost. These are all elements of usability — how the user navigates through and uses your web site. And yes, usability has an impact on SEO. Especially from the perspective of your site links and loading times

When a search engine crawler comes to your site, it crawls through the site, looking at keywords, links, contextual clues, meta and HTML tags, and a whole host of other elements. The crawler will move from page to page, indexing what it finds for inclusion in search results. But if that crawler reaches the first page and can’t get past the fancy Flash you’ve created, or if it gets into the site and finds links that don’t work or that lead to unexpected locations, it will recognize this and make note of it in the indexed site data. That can damage your search engine rankings.”

This is exactly my point. If I have to study to hard or decipher the images or animation in a Flash movie for navigation or site content, forget about it, I’m leaving!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Accessibility, CSS, Design, HTML, SEO, Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.