Multi touch gestures are defined as inputs where more than one finger can be used on a surface to perform actions on a electronic page and display.

With an onset of new devices and platforms coming at the moment, including the popular and newly released iPad and the Iphone, but also Android, and other multi touch devices, designing for these platforms have become more and more demanding, and there could be real impact on search engine optimisation for devices and pages that are made for multi touch gesture devices.

The most exciting platforms and devices to work on have multi touch are currently:

iPad
iPhone OS
iPhone OS 4 supposedly dual sided touch
Tablet PC’s
Windows Mobile 7
Android Mobile
Wacom
Microsoft Surface
GestureWorks (Flash)
OSX Trackpad
OSX MultiTouch Mouse

We think this is only the beginning, and that more and more touch sensitive and gravity and motion sensitive devices will be created now that the technology is available, we expect this to be put in more and and more devices, and this brings us to the problem with designing and optimising pages for multi touch enabled devices.

With gestures now becoming available in layovers in html will this have an impact on SEO?

Unless the code is implemented in a non user friendly way, we do not estimate that this will have an impact on SEO if the new gestures ad codes are implemented with the same rules that counts for normal websites you shoudl always ask yourself.
Are your designs user friendly and does the code make sense to the user and the robots?

Will touch based menus and browsing using non anchor text have an impact on a page search engine value (SEO)?

With more touch gestures coming to the web and mobile sites then your SEO could suffer as some menu items that were previously anchor based could become obsolete and browsing could be by the flick of a finger. Google is at the current state not fully finished with their mobile search engine, and this means that mobile SEO is a new form that doesn’t follow the same rules as the web, however a lot of the same SEO factors count on mobile pages such as anchor text links, copy, headers and titles continue to remain the most important part of mobile SEO. Multitouch gestures should not impact these, however some footer text links could be limited and certain image based browsing could be impossible for the search engines to read, so make sure you have a professional mobile SEO expert check your code.

Does multi touch gestures mean less Search Engine Friendly?
As described above multi touch gestures should not mean less search engine friendly sites, however as described it puts an emphasis of using the correct anchors and titles even more, and to generate new pages on titles bases on gestures but having the non gestured link in the footer would help.

What are the most common gestures and which gestures have an impact on seo?
Tap
Press
Multi finger tap
Press and tap
Double Tap
Drag
Press and drag
Press and drag and tap
Multi finger drag
Squeese
Pinch
Spread
Splay
Two finger drag
Flick
Rotate
Multi Finger Rotate

The most common gestures that will have an impact on SEO are Tap, Press, Flick as they are gstures that could be use for navigation on a page, we recommend using these gestures here they are the most user friendly implementations and to ensure that there is a text link in the navigation to ensure crawl-ability of the gestures.