1. If developers do not implement Flash detection, pages can appear broken to visitors. They leave the site and/or do not convert to prospects/leads/sales.
2. If flash detection is done poorly, it can be seen as cloaking to search engines – which is returning different content for search engines than for visitors. This is rare, but possible.
3. If flash is the sole navigation for search engines and human visitors to follow, search engines cannot spider the site. This is the kiss of death you’ve probably heard about.

Some claim it isn’t a problem any more because:

Adobe has implemented better accessibility in the last few versions. But these links are still hard to follow and rarely rank well in the engines. MSN/LIVE has enough problems with HTML links, and probably will not find the content. Also, the landing page where visitors would land sometimes doesn’t show properly – it could be a part of a flash animation that doesn’t load, etc.

Google made a deal with flash that allows flash to be crawled more easily. But again, these links are still hard to follow and rarely rank well in the engines. Google seems to be looking more for hidden redirects and other black hat techniques with their Adobe API deal.

So what can you do to make sure your content is accessible to search engines, and seen as a valuable landing page for organic search visitors? Nothing beats good old fashioned HTML: Links that can be followed, and relevant keywords marking the content from it’s anchor text and title tags down to it’s keyword density.

Now look through the related queries for “Chocolate“. Go ahead – I’ll wait. It appears many of us are writing about chocolate and writing about mobile seo in the same places. I’m going to bet more people are writing about chocolate, and I don’t blame them:

Mobile SEO is the (sometimes thankless) task of making sure websites look good on all sorts of mobile devices, including handhelds, cell phones, zunes, and the new ipod touch(which is probably a “no brainer”). Few mobile seo simulators are available online, which means field testing. And then page tweaking. It can be a time consuming and arduous task. It’s best accompanied with plenty of chocolate.