I have a website that ranks in the top 5 for it's major search term. Problem is my site is extremely boring and I am considering switching over to a flash design. If i switch from full html/css to full flash will this negatively effect my serps? Are interior links treated differently in flash sites from normal ones?
I assume you’re talking about your beer pong table site, right? Here’s the thing with Flash sites, the search engines hate them and users generally love them. This is the age old question in the SEO industry. Do you design the site for search engines or for people? The answer is simple. Who buys your products? People do, not Google, Yahoo and MSN. So if you want to sell more product think user experience. With that said you are going to lose your rankings and resulting traffic! Anytime major changes are made to a site, ranking will usually fluctuate down. Add into that you going form a search engine friendly HTML /CSS site to Flash, and you’re making a big mistake. There are ways to design user friendly sites while still appeasing the search engines. Try using both Flash and HTML in a hybrid model. But if you must use Flash, you can always add some JavaScript that checks for the Flash player in visitor’s browsers. If the user has Flash installed them show them the Flash movie, and for users who don’t display an HTML backup. Just be sure you match the content of your Flash movie. It’s a big ‘NO-NO’ to show Google a bunch of text and all other users a Flash movie. If you have any more questions let me know!
I would not switch your site over to an all flash designed site. Doing so will hurt your rankings drastically. I understand about developing your site for the end user and not the search engines. However I would combine both concepts into one and make your site. Keep what you have now because you know it is working and ranking well. I would just incorporate a little bit of flash somewhere on the site. That flash should not be your text, and if you choose to make a flash navigation system then make sure you have those same links as text somewhere else on the page. In a nutshell I advice from going with a full flash website.
It really depends, if you have built your ranking on links than you should have no problem at all with switching over to an all flash site. At the end of the day you should always think about what is best for your customer, and how you can gain more conversions.