Google is able to index Flash pages...somewhat. But some special thought needs to go into getting search engines to understand what any flash content is about. Gravity Search Marketing have a good site "Your SEO Plan" . It has a lot of useful stuff, including advice about Flash. Here's an excerpt : "Flash Best Practices for SEO To help search engines see and properly list your website contents in their search results, we recommended the following best practices for Flash SEO: * Use Flash only when necessary, and consider wrapping decorative flash elements in HTML navigation if possible. Pages should degrade gracefully for users who do not have javascript or Flash. * Build separate HTML landing pages (with distinct URLs) for your separate Flash landing "pages." Each separate HTML page should deep link to the appropriate part of your Flash movie. * Embed your Flash using SWFobject so that you can display alternate HTML content. Make sure that the text content in the alternate HTML is as identical as possible to the Flash content. Graphic elements can be described, just as you would describe a photo with a caption or an image ALT tag.
I've had decent ranking results from clients who insist on flash sites by naming the swf file a keyword name.
Our blog is highly optimized for SEO and our main, outdated Flash website from 2007 is still lingering on the front. Though we do rank very well, and Google can read Flash, if SEO is the focus I would suggest going with a PHP-based platform or having an HTML columned footer below the Flash file. I think Flash can be bad for SEO, but there are many ways around it.
Hi there Flash movies can be a great thing. They can help catch eyes that are otherwise bored with static looking pages, and they can help tell a story better than plain text. However the use of flash must be tempered with the ability to rank in search engines.
Yeah Spiders don't index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give it an alternative textual description.