How Google’s Search Preview Changes Web Design for Flash

Google recently introduced website preview within search results that allow potential visitors to preview the website before they click through to the page by hovering their cursor above the magnifying glass in the SERP’s.

This gives the user the opportunity to decide if the information they are looking for is even going to be on the site before they click on the link from the search results page.

Does this affect click through rate to a website?

Maybe, maybe not. It’s still too early to tell if this feature will be adopted by the majority of people searching on the Internet. What it will do is change the way we think about using Flash technology on a website though.

Currently, any flash on a website is displayed as a blank area in Google’s preview feature.

Here’s a search for “dentist dallas”:

This is the first listing that displays for that particular search. You can see how Google displays a live preview of the site and you can decide if you want to click through to find the information you’re looking for.

A couple of websites down, we see that this website has a flash banner across the top of the webpage:

Since this is a live preview, Google’s technology cannot capture the flash elements. This may change in the future, but as of right now that flash block will show the underlining css color for the webpage.

This website is still okay because it only has the flash banner on the page with a lot of other text.

But what happens to a page that is mostly (or entirely) built in flash?

As you can see here, this website displays almost no information. This is because the majority of the website is built around flash. Here is a screen shot of the actual page:

Just looking at the Google preview, it would be very unlikely that someone would be motivated enough to click through to the website.

Besides not being SEO friendly, flash is a technology that should be used sparingly if you’re trying to drive more traffic to your website from a search engine marketing perspective.

I’m not trying to put down the technology, there are some awesome flash sites and they serve their purpose well when driving traffic from a PPC campaign or a traditional marketing initiative, but the technology is still difficult to index in the search engines for keywords that are relevant to your website because of the lack of content that a search engine spider can “view” and index accordingly.

So, before you decide that having an awesome site put together in flash to “wow” visitors you need to understand what your goals are for the website and how you plan on marketing it to drive Internet traffic.

3 Comments

1. No, website preview does not play a major effect on the Click through. most of the users will visit the website. Anyway good Topic. Thanks for the Share

   dotcomweavers
   January 12, 2011 at 9:08 am

2. I hope they solve it soon. I think this search preview is of great help when looking for information.

   Paul Simon
   April 6, 2011 at 7:49 pm

3. This is a good news as far as I’m concerned. Most of the time we are just relying on the meta tags in selecting sites in the SERP.
   But this improvement makes a difference. The information displayed will be more accurate in terms of choosing the right information.

   Armil@Dentist Dallas
   April 26, 2011 at 6:45 pm