Comments on: Healthy Food Healthy You – Unhealthy SEO

By: Yoray Narainpersad

Yoray Narainpersad — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:21:22 +0000

Google does index the flash but struggles, the title tags & meta tags in this case will be indexed.

Regards
Yoray Narainpersad

By: Karyn

Karyn — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:24:10 +0000

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.

By: Rob Dickens

Rob Dickens — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:40:28 +0000

But Flash looks soooo pwetty :p

By: Shaan

Shaan — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:38:15 +0000

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!

By: Diane

Diane — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:53:36 +0000

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.

By: Tony Lopes

Tony Lopes — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:27:52 +0000

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

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:22:44 +0000

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.