First off, I hope everyone is having a great holiday

Now to the point - I have heard and read numerous times that embedding any important items within a flash plugin is not a good idea for search engine rankings. This seems to be pretty common knowledge.

But one of our sites (an existing site that came with a new business partner) had its navigation and a lot of content built using flash. When I did a search for one of the keywords from the page title, I was shocked to see both the page and the Flash file indexed in the top two results, respectively.

Did I miss something here? I've been bombarded with "never use flash for links and navigation" but these files are still showing up in the SERPs - And near the top. If we were to change the navigation to HTML, would it actually make a difference? Please help me demystify this.

Cheers