- Cloaking. It’s too easy to cloak with swf files: off-stage text, transparent/invisible text, text on the stage but users can never reach or use ActionScript to hide text.
- Bad user experience. When a user clicks at a swf link in search results, the swf file will be opened ‘nakedly’ in the browser, filling up the full browser. If the swf file is meant to be shown in full browser, it’s not much a problem. However, most of swf files are meant to be shown in a specific dimension and they will scale up and get pixelated in this case.
- Broken link. Following from point 2, if the swf file is directly opened in a browser, some swf files can not run properly. Some files require communication with JavaScript and some need the data set by flashvars (in embed tag) or addParameters (in swfobject).
- Cloak to solve the problem. Problem 2 and 3 can be solved with some detection codes. If the swf file detects that it’s ‘naked’, without a HTML holder, it can automatically refresh to the HTML page. However, the problem is that you are cloaking.
- Inaccurate link. A swf link from a search engine doesn’t directly bring the user to the information he/she is searching for, in most cases. It’s very unlikely that when a user searches for “curry chicken” and the linked swf file has “curry chicken” is in the landing screen. Most likely, the user needs to click around to look for the content again. On top of that, Flash does not support full page text search and of cause, search engine can’t highlight the search words either.
