Why, when we have the technology, do South African sites still have terrible search engine optimization? SEO is nothing new – it’s been around since the Internet, for goodness sake.
Here’s an example by Discovery Health: http://www.healthyfoodhealthyyou.co.za/
This is a great site with tons of excellent goodies: videos, recipes, great articles and celebrities.
The site even has Facebook advertising to support it.
Unfortunately someone decided that the ENTIRE site should be developed using FLASH, so none of the content will ever get indexed or rank in a search engine.
It’s a real shame that so many South African companies still don’t bother reading about search engine optimization and implementing it.
Click on the thumbnails below:
The thumbnail on the left shows the content rich, awesome, well-designed site. The thumbnail on the right shows what Google thinks the site is about:
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- A great, content rich website – invisible to search engines
Richard
July 6, 2009 at 11:22 am
If it was however done in flex, it would look exactly the same, and be fully indexed by Google and other search engines. Flex runs on the flash runtime, but is built using flex.
Epic discovery fail
Example nike plus site, all done in flex
http://www.google.co.za/search?q=site%3Anikeplus.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
fully indexed by Google.
Flash should not be used to design sites (it was never designed for that), rather design components within sites. If you want a fully animated functional site that can be indexed by search engines we would use flex.
Tony Lopes
July 6, 2009 at 11:27 am
Yes, Google indexes flash, but it’s not done very well yet, and it’s not what the web dev team at Discovery/whatever agency built this had in mind if you look at the way it was implemented.
Here’s some official Google discussion:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
Diane
July 6, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Oversight of note. Especially since the TV show will generate interest enough for people to go online and check out the website. With a long URL like that, people are going to try using search engines to find this site.
Shaan
July 6, 2009 at 1:38 pm
What Richard said, is exactly why South African sites suck with SEO. Besides the obvious fact that a site using flash uses more bandwidth than a site that can be designed without using flash. It’s called common sense…
However, on the flip side, it does depend on what the purpose of the site is. I assume the Discovery site was just put up for the sake of having an informative site up, but even still, there’s not even any meta data in the source.
Also, what Diane said is also true. Who’s gonna remember that long url? Not many people, I can promise you that. A google search doesn’t show the Discovery site for the words healthy food healthy you. *sigh*
This site would kill the serp’s if it wasn’t flash. It’s a really cool site I will admit, but Tony’s also right, just even the smallest but of extra “love” in the source would help this site ALOT!
Rob Dickens
July 6, 2009 at 2:40 pm
But Flash looks soooo pwetty :p
Karyn
August 19, 2009 at 8:24 am
Hey, Im not sure i understand all the technical jargon here, but i do love the site healthyfoodhealthyyou.co.za I tried to log in today but it just would’nt open. All the weeks before it opened without any difficulty, so is it this flash prob thing. What shud i do. I dont know if i have flash. If not where can i download it from..Please help.
Yoray Narainpersad
January 22, 2010 at 8:21 am
Google does index the flash but struggles, the title tags & meta tags in this case will be indexed.
Regards
Yoray Narainpersad