The revolutionary software creator Adobe Systems Inc. has teased SEO consultants across the web by announcing the opening of Flash. But, it is simply another effort to popularize its Flash player through the Open Screen Project.

The Open Screen Project will allow flash developers to publish content and applications on desktop and mobile gadgets.

Adobe did not mention anything about including solutions to make web content available for search engines. This project will just give further support to Flash industry architects, open access to its licenses and related code details, as well as pulling out all restrictions related to the application’s use.

Although I agree with a statement from Adobe's CEO, "Adobe Flash Player is the world’s most pervasive client runtime," because of its creative options, as an SEO consultant I have to say that Flash should only be used to enhance the user experience in very specific areas of a website.

Flash-based websites are just invisible to search engines. From a usability standpoint, we always discourage our clients from even featuring a 15 second splash video on their websites; most of the time users do not watch them.

Adobe Flash hides your rich content from search engines, and they usually have difficulties following links.

Until Adobe announces an SEO-friendly Flash version, that is to say, a Flash model that allows search engines to read and follow links from content and menus --- making it organically crawl-able for search engines, I do not think that any search engine optimization consultant nor interactive marketing agency will recommend the use of Flash.

For companies that "must" have Flash versions of their websites, they should be simply that; Flash versions. The main version and landing pages of their websites should always be HTML based. You can always provide users with a link to the Flash version. Just make sure you hide these from crawlers (define) in the robots file (define).

And as we always put forward, try to measure this with web analytics to support your experiment. You will be amazed about your findings.