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vangogh
12-18-2008, 01:32 PM
I found an article at Search Engine Guide on 5 things that can kill your rankings (http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/5-search-engine-ranking-killers-you-want.php). These are some basics of building a site and they are definitely things to pay attention. Doing these right won't guarantee your pages rank well, but doing them wrong can really stop the show before it even goes on stage.


Little or No Content
Improperly Designed Navigation
Flash Sites
Duplicate Pages
Improper Title and Meta Description Tags

Read the article for the details.

Again doing these right won't guarantee success. Consider them among the foundation and building blocks of a search engine friendly website.

Have any other potential show stoppers to share?

KristineS
12-18-2008, 03:59 PM
I thought Google was indexing Flash now. Am I incorrect about that?

Maybe it was only Flash pages and not an entire site done in Flash.

vangogh
12-18-2008, 04:15 PM
They're working with Adobe to be able to read Flash better. I think they're more able to crawl links within a Flash file, but I don't believe they can yet read the text that's inside of a Flash file.

I wouldn't recommend building an all Flash site and I think it's still best to assume if you have something inside a Flash application the content won't be seen.

There's nothing wrong with using Flash though. There are some great Flash applications and if you have one it could be very useful or entertaining for real people who might send a lot of links to the page. But odds are nothing inside the application will be seen by search engines. If the page ranks it would rank based on the text around the application, the links to the page, the name of the file, etc, but not the content inside the file.

That makes building an all Flash site a dangerous proposition when it comes to search engines. They'll find your site and perhaps be able to follow the links, but they still aren't going to see your content, which would greatly reduce the odds that the search engine will know what your site is about.

The situation with search engines and Flash is probably better than it was a couple years ago, but hardly to the point where anyone concerned with search engines traffic would want to build an all Flash site. A Flash application inside an html site, yes. A site built entirely from Flash, no.

billbenson
12-18-2008, 08:12 PM
I have three or so pages on a lousy site with some products we don't sell much. The manufacture has a flash site. I'm number 1 with a couple of lousy html pages. The manufacturers flash site doesn't show in the first 100 unless you type in their exact URL.

Perhaps there are ways to optimize flash pages that the manufacturer isn't aware of. I don't use much flash so I can't comment ont that. I do use that page as a guide as to whether G can read flash. So far, I'm still number 1 and they don't appear in the first 100. Gotta tell you something about using flash!

vangogh
12-18-2008, 08:45 PM
Yep. There are some things you can do to lessen the problems Flash can cause, but for now, assuming search engine traffic is important to you, you're still better off building sites in html. In fact it's often recommended for people with Flash sites is to build an html version along side the Flash version.