This is part two of my post that I started on Tuesday on why restaurants should not use flash websites. I knew when I wrote the blog there would be designers/developers that would categorically deny that Flash is bad for SEO. As I started in the previous blog, I love Flash, it has it’s place, and yes, if you know what you are doing, there are ways to make Flash search-able by the search engines. So where does that leave us. Let me ask you a question (Flash Developers), how many times do you see a Flash site come up on page one of the search engines? I will answer that, almost never. The fact is, content embedded in Flash does not index well by the search engines. This means that if you plan on having an SEO strategy, there is no place for Flash. A couple of my Twitter followers also correctly pointed out, the rendering problems on mobile devices. I would dare say, in the an industry that the customers are heavy users of mobile devices, this is a bad combination.

Ok, let’s do some keyword research to prove my point. Go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search Here on Google’s advanced search tool, there are several things to do. First, in the file type drop-down menu, choose, Shockwave Flash (.swf). After you do this, you will notice that in the top cell you will now see ‘filetype:swf’. Second In the results per page, the default is 10, and it is grayed out. In order to get more results per page, you have to disable your Google Instant, which is the Google drop-down auto fill as you type a search query. You can go here to change your preferences:

http://www.google.com/preferences

Now in the results per page drop-down, you can change the default after you refresh the page to 100 results. Lastly simply type the search term you want, in this case we will type ‘restaurant’, and then hit the Advanced Search.

Below as shown in the picture are the results.

As you can see there are, there are 1,090,000 results returned. Look closely at each entry, you will now see a curious abbreviation before each title, circled in red. The ‘[Flash]’ is now next to the entries, denoting that the result is in fact a flash document.

Here, though is where you run into that ‘orphaned’ file problem. Even if it does come up in the search engines, the flash file usually is orphaned. This means the search engine has indexed just an image file, not the whole site. For example, look at the third entry, a very good restaurant in Baltimore, Sotto Sopra.

Click on the URL, and you will see, it doesn’t return a complete page, but only partial of the page as shown below. Now here is the problem after you do the search for only Flash files. Click on any one of the flash file search results URL’s. You will typically get an orphaned image file, in other words, an image file within the site, not the site itself.

To further test the results, take out the filetype:swf  file type in your search query and just leave in restaurant. In the image below, you will see that Google returns  1,3380,000,000 results. That’s Billion, not million. Now for the fun part, go through each page of the returned results and let me know when you see the first result for ‘restaurant’ that is a Flash [Flash] file. I grew tired of searching for a Flash site after the first 500 results. I bet if you were bored, you could search a lot longer until you found a Flash website in those results. Even if you do, it would more than likely be an orphaned file from the Flash website.

So why do designers keep designing Flash websites for restaurants? Again, unless you are a celebrity chef, or your restaurant has three Michelin stars, where people find you, not the other way, you are doing a dis-service to your client.  I think having elements of Flash in a well-designed site can add a lot of elegance, but know the market segment you are designing for, and develop the site accordingly.