Most website owners would like to get the best search engine visibility possible. After all ranking well for popular keywords that are related to the content of your site is important for generating traffic.
Flash introduction pages can and most likely will hurt your search engine rankings. Think about it, the main page to your website is the one that is most linked to. It is your best opportunity to get search engines to rank you highly for competitive keywords in your particular niche. If you miss out on the opportunity to place those keywords on that page by using flash, it seriously decreases your chances for ranking well in search engines.
If you truly love flash and the elements that it can bring to your webpage use it with care. Use it as an element to complement the content of your webpage’s much like a picture does. If fact, use it in place of complementary pictures. But you should not use it as a complete introduction to your website.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
My site at 1stcourses.com has a flash intro. I was told by a guy in India that did some work for me that a site link put into the home page for the other pages made it ok to use the flash. Was he correct? Please submit any answers. Thanks.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
John - I checked your site and I think the key for you is in the last paragraph. You do have flash on your intro page but it is done in a way much like a picture is there to complement the design. You also have content there and there is more content than flash. There are many sites out there that are so in love with the flash aspects they design an entire intro page made up of flash components. I see them more often than you would think and pages like that have nothing for robots to index.