Your expert help would be appreciated.

Cheers.

Jody

http://www.searchmatters.net/2007/07/16/google-flash-fixes-can-be-%e2%80%9cdangerous%e2%80%9d/

There’s a recent post from a googler in the webmaster forum that talks about SWFObject you may be interested in:

Here’s the text:

Jason-

Sorry for the late response! As you already know, talking about Flash
and SEO can cause important conversations, and the same holds true
here at Google. However, after soliciting the help of the inimitable
Adam Lasnik and Greg Grothaus (et al.), I hope the following can clear
up the running questions:

The goal of our guidelines against hidden text and cloaking are to
ensure that a user gets the same information as the Googlebot.
However, our definition of webspam is dependent on the webmaster’s
intent. For example, common sense tells us that not all hidden text
means webspam–e.g. hidden DIV tags for drop-down menus are probably
not webspam, whereas hidden DIVs stuffed full of unrelated keywords
are more likely to indicate webspam.

I bring this up because, although your method is hiding text behind a
very pretty Flash animation, you are still presenting the same content
to both the user and the search engine, and offering it through
different media. This should not harm your search rankings.

However, Beussery raised a very good point when he said “Content in
plain view is golden.” If ever your SWFObject were to display an
“ElephantCo Car Trunks” logo while the standard HTML version was
showing “ElephantCo Car Trunks–well suited to every vehicle from
Altima to Z4!” then you would have stumbled into the realm of hiding
text to modify search behavior, and have crossed over the black-hat
line.

I’ve looked over your example site, http://www.blitzagency.com/ and I
like what I’ve seen. As you describe them, your methods are not
trying to fool users or Search Engines, which means a good experience
for both. Although the HTML versions of your pages are not always
very user-friendly, e.g. visiting http://www.blitzagency.com/clients.html
with javascript disabled loses the categorization and images
associated shown in the flash version.

The only concern I have is where links to your site will be pointing
and what the link text may say. Googlebot deals with #anchors
differently than ?arguments. Googlebot treats ?arguments as strict
part of the URL string, but ignores #anchors, since in normal HTML,
they all point to the same page…

Because your (very ingenious) navigation scheme relies on #anchors and
then dynamically loads the content in flash, the pages people go to
might . A link pointing to http://www.blitzagency.com/aboutUs.html#clients
should send pagerank to /aboutUs.html , though the text in the link
may be associated with the content in clients.html. You could try to
stop this by including “Link to this page” buttons to encourage
linking with an #anchor-free URLs.

Hope this clarifies things-
-Bergy