WOW! Did you see that?!? Holy Cow! Man is that ever kewel!

That is the general reaction when someone sees a site utilizing Flash. It has some great effects. Some amazing things can be done with Flash. Search engines can't see it nor index it. My advice is to stay away from it.

OK, well, if you really want to use some buried somewhere in your site, for some snazzy effect, or for some real purpose that it is suited to, fine. Go ahead. Just don't use it on your main page, or create one of those splash pages where you arrive at a flash page when you type in yourdomain.com and then have to click into the main site. Sheesh! I really hate that.

Google is attempting to index flash pages. They are experimenting with it. They will no doubt eventually get their but it will take longer to get a Flash page indexed simply because it's another step, and you'll need to wait for it. Bottom line is simply that engines do not index flash and it is a negative when it comes to optimization.

I have seen sites that are doing well and have great listings go through a re-design and add flash, and other bad news things, and lose their listings and leave themselves dead in the water. If you really want to shoot yourself in the foot try adding a lot of flash, javascript and dynamic URLs to your site. Bye.