We've been testing Flash content in the search engines for more than 3 years. There's no surprise here - in our findings Google can read the content (sometimes) but HTML is best in all our tests.
So, the big question remains - how do you get that fancy font to appear in HTML?
You have 2 choices -
1) Place the image on the visible area of the page and tuck the text in a div layer. Either place the div layer under the image or shove it off the page with a -5000 x or z axis placement. If this sounds treacherous, it is. This is an old trick and Google can see right through it. You will be undoubtedly deemed suspicious and your SEO rankings may falter.
2) Word from the Google Webmaster Blog folks suggest using a script that calls Flash to alter the display of the content. This practice displays the same content to visitors and the Googlebot alike. A win-win as far as we're concerned.
From the blog:
"sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML -- it's just displayed by an embedded Flash object."
We use sIFR on most of our marketing sites. The new First Scribe home page uses sIFR in the top navigation buttons. We present the proper typeface while also enabling optimized text links to the top-level pages.
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