Is it Black Hat to embed H1 tags into Flash?

[DXL]

I took a peek at a site's coding today, and noticed something I hadn't seen before. There was an H1 tag in the source code with the site's target keywords. The text, however, wasn't visible anywhere on the actual page. Here's a snippet of the code with small edits. Can someone explain what this is actually doing, if it's Black Hat since the title tag is invisible on the page, or if it's even effective?

<td width="12" bgcolor="#C80007"><span class="style1"></span></td>
<td width="750" align="center" valign="top" background="images/backgroundpicture.gif"><!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="EditRegion2" -->
<h1>Company Name - Keyword Keyword Keyword</h1>
<script>loadFlashSEO("h1", "flashfiles/siteheader.swf", 750, 280, "swf/")</script>

[Quadrille]

It could be simply sloppy coding; many flash developers have no idea how to make their site 'visible' to SEs, so weird things happen; many such sites look pretty sick in SEO terms!

But deliberately using 'seo friendly' tags to game the SEs, with no benefit to visitors is spam.

[edited by: Quadrille at 11:11 pm (utc) on July 22, 2007]

[Robert Charlton]

That's not even a proper h1... and even if it had been a proper h1, whoever coded it had no idea what the function of an h1 is. Hx elements are structural elements, not text or image or Flash file emphasizers.

See this post about how headings work on a page...

[webmasterworld.com...]

[ptolemy]

I think the real question is how do you SEO a flash site. The H1 tag is a proper HTML command and Google allows it. But question is to take this even further, is the following "black hat"?

<tr>
<td width="100%" height="500" align="center">
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="770" height="525" id="Home" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="Home.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed src="Home.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="770" height="525" name="Home" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>

<noscript>
<h1>Company Name Keyword phrase</h1>
<p><b>Company Name...</b></p>
<p>More about the company here...</p>
<a href="/sitemap.xml">Google</a>>&nbsp;&nbsp;
<a href="/site-map.asp">Site Map</a>
</noscript>
</td>
</tr>

This concept is done every day by many in the "SEO Flash" side.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 5:14 pm (utc) on July 27, 2007]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]