SEO Tycoon

**andyjames** · 08-01-2008, 12:30 PM

I work for a new stock footage company, my main responsibility is SEO work. The site went live in early 2008, I noticed that google was taking ages to index pages even though I had submitted xml sitemaps to help things along.

On google webmaster tools, I noticed a warning about a page timeout. We had a large flash file (approx 25MB) streaming on the homepage which was a showreel of the site catalogue. I then put the slow indexing down to this.

So I moved the file off the homepage and linked the flash file from another page and I don't get the error message anymore. Indexing has got a little better but that could be down to the fact that there are now loads of sites linking to us, (the site is now currently PR3) and may not neccessarily have anything to do with the file.

Any ideas if....
(1) Large flash files on a homepage impact indexing of a site in google?
(2) If so, how are other sites getting around this? I see loads of big companies with impressive flash video (example, sony studios).

I'd really like to move it back but don't want to impact search engine indexing.

Andy

**darrenfox** · 08-01-2008, 01:13 PM

Unfortunately there is no real trick around it, especially with file size. Flash currently has a negative impact on all SEO although Adobe is working on making it more SEO friendly but that is still down the road. The companies that do use the flash videos make up for it in content or they use flash to present ideas that are not necessarily things that someone would be searching. It also depends on how the flash is created, if it is simply shapes and text, the file size is much smaller than those which utilize transitioning photos.

**chrishirst** · 08-01-2008, 04:07 PM

No matter what the size of any files loaded by the home page it will make absolutely zero difference to how long it takes for a crawler to load the source code.

SE bots only grab the HTML source code generated by the server. They do not render images, load flash files, or download any external files (CSS or js).

**raven1083** · 08-05-2008, 02:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

No matter what the size of any files loaded by the home page it will make absolutely zero difference to how long it takes for a crawler to load the source code.

SE bots only grab the HTML source code generated by the server. They do not render images, load flash files, or download any external files (CSS or js).

well said i totally agree with you.

**robert25** · 08-06-2008, 01:08 PM

yes I do think that way either..

**francis84** · 08-07-2008, 11:52 PM

I have seen a FULL FLASH website... How does it was optimize if the SE spider can't read? I read in a article that GOOGLE and YAHOO are trying their best to crawl and read flash.