Does a 6-second flash intro affect my site's rankings?

[073165]

Before I have an flash intro designed, I wanted to know if anyone has noticed a drop in traffic generated from search engines when adding a flash intro to their site?

[jimbo_dk]

A flash intro won't have anything to do with rankings, except for pissing most users off. What will drop rankings would be to replace your existing (already indexed) home page for a Flash intro. It will take a while for the SEs to figure out the new pages.

[stymiee]

It's bad for SEO. Basically you are wasting your homepage which should be filled with keyword rich content. Instead you have flash which can't be read by search engines and now you will be splitting your links between your splash page and real home page. Add in the fact that users hate splash pages/flash intros and you have a good reason to consider removing it.

[kompoint]

When I see flash intro, I close the website.
I want information.
I don't want flash.

[felgall]

99.999999999% of visitors leave without waiting for a flash intro to finish downloading. It is the most effective "go away" message that you can add to the home page of a site.

How long the Flash runs for is irrelevant as no one will wait long enough to find out - they'll all be gone within a second or so of seeing that the page has no useful content.

[jimbo_dk]

Originally Posted by felgall

It is the most effective "go away" message that you can add to the home page of a site.

Priceless quote. If only I could show this to some of my clients.

[ushuiah]

Before I have an flash intro designed, I wanted to know if anyone has noticed a drop in traffic generated from search engines when adding a flash intro to their site?

Most search engine spiders are still unable to properly index Flash content. Search engine spiders are designed to read text and ignore images, so placing the majority of your site's content in a Flash file leaves most search engines without much content to read and use to determine your site's ranking.

100% flash on the homepage can be a fundamental 'no-no' in the SEM world. See this page about using flash on your site.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/to-flash-or-not-to-flash

[felgall]

Jacob Neilsen listed Flash intros as the worst thing people could do with regard to web page accessibility beack in about 2001. More recently he has said that the only reason it is no longer on the list of the absolute worst things you can do is that no professionally designed site does such stupid things any more. Only newbie amateur sites still use them (making it the easiest way to tell that a site has been created by a newbie who doesn't know the first thing about web accessibility).

[seriocomic]

Consider this question answered!

And Stephen, are you sure it's not 99.99997% ?

[DaveWoods]

If you want to add Flash to part of the page to add a bit of movement and animation just for decoration then by all means go down that route but never use flash for critical content.

Flash does have its uses and can add an extra level to the overall presentation but I'd personally never go down the route these days of creating a flash splash page (or any kind of splash page for that matter) or a complete flash website.

[BlazeMiskulin]

Originally Posted by felgall

Jacob Neilsen ... has said that the only reason it is no longer on the list of the absolute worst things you can do is that no professionally designed site does such stupid things any more. Only newbie amateur sites still use them (making it the easiest way to tell that a site has been created by a newbie who doesn't know the first thing about web accessibility).

He's at least partially wrong on this. There are a lot of professionally-designed sites that have significant or total flash content.

Go to the site of any auto manufacturer. They're almost all entirely Flash-driven. I'm going to take a guess here and say that BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, and Mercedes are all using professional designers, not newbies.

I despise Flash. I've got it blocked via the FlashBlock extension in Firefox. But I have to deal with these types of sites on a daily basis, and to say that "only newbie sites" use it is simply incorrect.

[C. Ankerstjerne]

Well, you did conveniently edit out an important part: Flash intros. What you are referring to aren't intros.

Besides, just because a website is from a major auto corporation, doesn't mean that they have a professional website. Case of point: http://www.volkswagen.com

• Useless CMS comments
• Random images displayed using Javascript
• Table-based layout
• Country-specific portals opened as pop-ups from drop-down menu

[felgall]

Anyone who has a flash site rather than a web site is losing a very large percentage of their potential audience. I have flash totally disabled in my browser (as many people do) and will only enable it for a site that I really want to use where there is no alternative (about once or twice a year). The rest of the time there are always proper web sites that I can go to for the same information.

[jimbo_dk]

Originally Posted by BlazeMiskulin

Go to the site of any auto manufacturer. They're almost all entirely Flash-driven. I'm going to take a guess here and say that BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, and Mercedes are all using professional designers, not newbies.

That's exactly the thing. Most of these sites are done by excellent 'designers' whose primary (sometimes only) specialty is design. They don't know anything about search engines not spidering flash, nor about accessibility.

Flash usage though is pretty high. The minority are the extra geeky people who use Flash only twice annually Even most users on dial-up connections are too ignorant to turn off flash.

[DaveWoods]

Also keep in mind that BMW, Lexus, Cadillac and Mercedes are huge multi-national companies that probably have hundreds of thousands of backlinks that are all high quality and therefore they need to do minimal on site optimization in order to rank highly.

I presume that most designers don't have the luxury of being in a position of promoting a website that's on the same scale as a company like BMW and therefore need to do everything they can to give these sites a fighting chance in the SERPs.

Also from a usability point of view, if the likes of Stephen were looking to buy a BMW then this may be the one occasion that he does actually enable Flash. If your spending millions of dollars a year on advertising or if you're site is in a similar niche where people will actually be looking for your product or service that they can't get elsewhere then you may be able to adopt a similar approach

[jimbo_dk]

Yups. Same goes for all those movie release sites.

[felgall]

I'd expect most people on dialup would not install the flash plugin in the first place as it would take a long time for it to be downloaded.

Movie sites are an obvious place to use flash to show excerpts from movies.

There is nothing wrong with use of flash within a site as long as the site is still accessible with flash disabled (or not installed). The one place on a site to avoid using flash is as an intro page as that acts to drive away more people than anything else you can do. Get the visitors into your site properly before you present them with flash.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by csswiz

Also keep in mind that BMW, Lexus, Cadillac and Mercedes are huge multi-national companies that probably have hundreds of thousands of backlinks that are all high quality and therefore they need to do minimal on site optimization in order to rank highly.

Exactly. At some point SEO no longer is necessary as the website has reached a critical mass where its own success is self-sustaining.

[Designer001]

Originally Posted by felgall

99.999999999% of visitors leave without waiting for a flash intro to finish downloading. It is the most effective "go away" message that you can add to the home page of a site.

How long the Flash runs for is irrelevant as no one will wait long enough to find out - they'll all be gone within a second or so of seeing that the page has no useful content.

i agree - no need flash intro

more content and title page should first - you can try flash intro in main webpage as small graphic somewhere would prefer

[worldofchat]

Hi there

I think flash intros just annoy people anyhow, so even from a visitors point of view i think its a no no, theres nothing worse than some intro kicking in that you have to sit thru, before u can actually do anything lol !

Woc

[BristolSEO]

A 6 second flash intro on a linkless page won't encourage an increase in your website ranking.

Your question needs more substance to be honest.

• What sector is this site in?
• How old is the site?
• What is the current rankings like?

If you are wanting to use flash into to encourage search engines to spider new content, this is naturally the incorrect approach. Whereas, if your confident your flash will increase organic interest due to the content of the flash, then would of achieved your goal.

Showing examples of large corporate websites having flash intro isn't a good example to the argument, as we are all aware of the bias that happens with larger websites in the eyes of SE's.

VW is a perfect example of a strong site using a flash intro. Some amount of flash files have been cached by Google and some even have a reasonable PR too. This proves flash isn't disliked by the search engines, but that it's just not as crawlable as a normal HTML link, therefore not as profitable in real estate screen space.

[jimbo_dk]

Originally Posted by BristolSEO

Your question needs more substance to be honest.

• What sector is this site in?
• How old is the site?
• What is the current rankings like?

What is the relevance?

Originally Posted by BristolSEO

This proves flash isn't disliked by the search engines, but that it's just not as crawlable as a normal HTML link, therefore not as profitable in real estate screen space.

Good point. Flash websites cab be spidered if they were built to be accessible. If all the text is stored as vector graphics, there is no chance of it being spidered.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by BristolSEO

VW is a perfect example of a strong site using a flash intro. Some amount of flash files have been cached by Google and some even have a reasonable PR too. This proves flash isn't disliked by the search engines, but that it's just not as crawlable as a normal HTML link, therefore not as profitable in real estate screen space.

Keep in mind that PR has nothing to do with content. It only has to do with link popularity only. So a page with only flash on it can have a high PR if enough links point to it.

In VW's case because they are such a large and popular company they will have enough link juice to overcome just about anything. Most regular sites don't have that luxury and a flash intro would just be a hindrance that they probably won't be able to overcome.

[DaveWoods]

Originally Posted by stymiee

In VW's case because they are such a large and popular company they will have enough link juice to overcome just about anything. Most regular sites don't have that luxury and a flash intro would just be a hindrance that they probably won't be able to overcome.

Also keep in mind that just because VW are a big company, have a high PR and good ranking doesn't mean that it's good practice.

VW will obviously generate a lot of traffic purely based on who they are but other factors need to be taken into consideration... bounce rate would be one that I'd be keen to look at to see how many potential users of their site they're losing purely down to them relying on Flash.

The VW site will be doing well but we should always focus on how much better they could be doing if they weren't using these methods.

[BlazeMiskulin]

Originally Posted by stymiee

Exactly. At some point SEO no longer is necessary as the website has reached a critical mass where its own success is self-sustaining.

Which was part of my point.

The original statement said that "no professional uses flash". That's simply not a true statement. There are lots of professional designers who use it, and use it well. They understand the factors involved and, at least in the case of the auto industry, realize that the "ooh ahh!" factor outweighs the losses.

People don't want to read about a car. They want to see it. They want the 360-degree spin-it-around flash animation. They want to see the wheels spinning, the lights flashing, and the graphic display on the ridiculously-expensive in-dash stereo bounce up and down.

That's what sells cars.

Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm going to guess that BMW and Mercedes and Lexus have a pretty good idea of what their viewers want to see on the website.