Flash Sites And Div Tags

Hi everyone. I am hoping you can help me… I lead the Search deptartment for an interactive agency, and I am trying to settle an age old argument with our design team, specifically Flash developers.

It is our stance that using DIV tags to display text content in order to allow flash content to be indexed and optimized is SPAM, as it it feels to close to hidden text, and if not developed correctly, it can lead to duplicate content (creating a dedicated URL for one part of a flash movie, with text content dedicated to that section held within that div tag.. and another DIV tag/URL with seperate content for another section of the original flash file) A user, upon clicking on one of these indexed links will be taken only to the beginning of the flash movie (if they are flash enabled), and as such each of these URL’s are duplicate content.

Between the two problems, we feel this crosses the line into SPAM.

The Flash team sees this as the solution for indexing and optimizing flash sites. They do not see this as SPAM, but rather compliant W3C and Google guidelines for alternate content for the disabled.

In addition, there is a cultural difference, in that that they feel any gray area is acceptible to undertake whereby we stand true to only white hat guidelines. They feel this is “cutting edge”, and we’ll be leaders in design and SEO by bringing this to clients now. I fear it will harm the agency’s reputation within the search marketplace.

I do not want any client sites being banned from Google for SPAM, nor do I want the ability for a client’s site to be fully optimizable to be compromised. We are having a roundtable in a few weeks to discuss this topic and come to a consensus for how to move forward. If you can provide me a sounding board on if this is acceptible to Google or not, that would be great. Is this going to be the acceted method moving forward, or is it going to result in penalties?

For a complete description of the technique they are recommmending, see:

www.jehochman.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml

thanks in advance for your help