There's no doubt you've seen Flash if you've spent any time on the web. It's a technology that provides interactive animation, which is why it is often used to create games. Unfortunately, some web designers use it to create entire websites. This is a problem.

You see, under the hood a web page is made up entirely of text in a format called HTML. When you see a picture on a web page, there's HTML code under the hood that tells the browser where to find that picture. There's also a brief description of the picture (if the web designer did his job).

When a search engine visits (spiders) your website, it reads the text and indexes it. When it encounters an image, it indexes the brief description, but otherwise has no idea whatsoever what's in the picture.

A flash website contains very little text even though it may not seem like it. In reality there's just enough text to tell your browser to download a movie file and play it.

When a search engine spiders that site, it doesn't play the movie. The "text" you see is all part of the movie, so the search engine knows nothing about it.

Flash is great for something like a product demo. But for an entire website? No way.