There's no denying it: Flash animation is fun.
Websites that feature flash animation offer some nice perks for their site visitors: Flash banners are aesthetically pleasing, animated, entrancing, and enjoyable; Flash applications are fun, interactive, and encourage user participation.
But the amusement of Flash animation is short-lived - and rarely goes beyond the user's experience. Sometimes, because of Flash animation, that experience may never get the chance to unfold. Why?
Flash has little to no SEO value.
1) Space Waster: Flash designs and animation take up a lot of space on your webpage, but contribute little to no SEO value. This translates to wasted space on your website that does not increase your rank or visibility in the search engines
2) Time Waster: Because Flash animation is so intricate, it can take a long time to load on a page. We're living in a real-time environment sustained by the concept of instant gratification. Simple put: your site visitors have very little patience. If your website takes too long to load due to Flash animation components, your readers will grow aggravated, uninterested, and they'll move on to another site.
3) Nonexistent Navigation. Many professional designers contend that "the worst thing you could possibly do" for your site is to integrate Flash navigation. The navigation of your website is a huge factor in SEO - and if search engines can't understand that the Flash navigation tabs, they won't be able to index your content.
Flash forward into the future...
Despite its drawbacks, Flash animation is a noteworthy element of web design. Recognizing this, popular search engines have slowly but surely announced that they will begin to crawl certain elements of Flash in such a way that will contribute to SEO.
Until Flash can be integrated in such a way that is SEO-friendly, designers continue to discourage its use in abundance - it may be pretty, but in most cases, it's pretty useless.