Of course, these animations have some influence on the way your site is "seen" and indexed by the search engines. The problem of Flash Search Engine Optimization arises, which is a very serious matter in terms of conversion and web site profitability.
What Are Flash Animations?
Flash files carry the extension .fla. For example a file might be named banner.fla where the .fla represents the flash format extention. The file will then need to be exported into a Shockwave Format (extension .swf) for use on the web page.
Any text that you include in the animation probably won't be indexed by the search engine as they rarely give attention to these formats. In spite of this there are search engines (Google, dir.com etc) that are able to read the text in these animations. The result is that any site or webpage that is built entirely in Flash will be invisible to the search engines which index only text content in html format.
Why Do Some Webmasters Use Flash
Due to the limited content contained on sites built entirely in Flash search engines will have difficulty indexing them and will therefore avoid these sites. Additionally spiders are not abIe to read the content of a .swf file. Some webmasters use flash to build mini-sties for specific campaign sites.
Flash is interesting for at least two reasons:
The impact of animation is maximized with flash and this improves the web's interactive and visual environment.
It can be combined successfully with other technologies (e.g. PHP, MySQL, XML, images, video, sound, etc.). It is therefore perfectly possible to create a dynamic web site in flash that also has content.
Pros
It allows the designer to put more content in a small-sized space without damaging the layout.
It is an easier way to present slide shows or movies.
Flash is ideal for creating banners, ads and flash videos.
For creating visual impact and drawing the eye to specific points of interest on a website Flash is the tool of choice.
Cons
Sites utilizing flash could take some time to load and it increases bandwidth consumption.
The vast majority of search engines will not index sites built entirely with Flash.
You could be at the mercy of the Flash developers - if you use 3rd party Flash developers, they might code the project so that you won't be able to make any changes and you will have to pay them for modifications
The "Back" button is usually disabled for flash websites and also Google's AdWords won't approve pages that have the Back button disabled. So, beware of this if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.
Flash may interrupt the visitor's experience on the site. For instance, never ending movies and sounds without volume control may drive some site visitors away.
Splash Pages don't favor your visibility - they lack the text that contains the keywords identified as pertinent to your services / products.
Optimizing Flash for the so-demanding search engines is not an easy task. The effort that must be done and the amount of energy that must be spent on SEO for Flash are far greater than for the optimization of a HTML site.