Hey guys, I'm thinking to jazz up my homepage a little by using flash or whatever else others may suggest. My question is, by using flash or anything else, could this hurt my ranking in G, Y, Or Msn? I heard once that this could in fact hurt rankings. I guess because the engines take a little longer to see everything on the page because of the flash. Thanks for your info.

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From Optimize Your Flash Site For Search Engines

A better way to incorporate Flash, if indeed your client must have it, is to first create an HTML site, and then use Flash movies in place of images, buttons, and banners. These areas are usually of little importance to a search engine anyway, so it seems fine to do it this way. In which case, optimizing this type of site is no different than optimizing a plain ole HTML site.

Personally, one aspect of Flash usage bugs me. Some sites use a Flash image in place of a jpeg , gif, or png. On those sites the same Flash picture "re-paints" on each page with a navigated change. Since browsers cache the images, this seems to be a terrible waste of bandwidth, not to mention drawing the viewer's attention away form the content.

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From a SEO perspective, use of flash opposed to other visual media such as images, videos etc there is no difference. However flash usage can effect SEO if you replace existing html or css navigation with flash navigation as flash links in 95% of cases cannot be parsed (read) by search engines. This if you are going to use flash navigation you should have a text link alternative. Take www.jimmessenger.com the flash navigation at the top with the images that pops up does not help spidering of the site, if the links to those same pages werent linked to with regular links the SE's could not find those pages.

We use flash in virtually all our designs and it has never impacted search engine rankings, its all in how you use it.

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Take www.jimmessenger.com

Got a good chuckle when right-click produced a pop-up with copyright law content.

Haven't seen that in a while.

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Jim had a lot of content theft & decided to take precautions to make it as difficult as possible to steal his stuff.

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yeah that is what happens when you write good content, people try to steal it. It certainly doesnt stop the web savvy from getting the copy, there are many ways to get it, however they will usually right click first, and this warning will necessarily have to be seen, so if Jim were to sue someone for content theft, they could not use the excuse that they thought they could copy content from websites and there isnt anything wrong with it. Takes away the "pleading ignorance" factor

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.