Yes, I know it's waaaay OT….

Not that I would ever consider placing the content of a website I'm building inside a Flash container, I've been asked to comment on a site someone else has constructed…

All the content is inside Flash. My initial remark was that Google etc will not rank the pages as highly in their indexes as a well designed html page as it is more difficult for the robots to read the content and put it in context. Am I thinking along the right lines?

google does try to index flash, not sure how well it works though. Better to stick with HTML anyway though, more accessible.

A webpage made up of just flash is rubbish. First it will be slow and a resource hog, second it is a security risk. Third it won't work on computers that (wisely) use a flash blocker.

Not that Apple are a perfect company, but the tide is against flash for the reasons above, which is why Apple don't allow it to run on iPads etc.

And regarding Google, don't quite get the comment above that Google indexes flash. What I do know is that Google have started ranking pages with speed as a criteria, and flash slows pages down.

Thanks – I know Flash "is crap" – it's just the question of indexing that I'm working on at the moment. I'm really worried I'm sticking my neck out against a well regarded consultant by saying that a site under construction is going to suffer if it goes all Flash, page rank wise…

Most flash sites aren't designed for spiders, which is why they fail at SEO. If it's properly structured with plenty of meaningful accessible linked structured content there should be no reason for it to drop in Google's index. I haven't come across many flash designers who could do that though :/ You can get most of the structure with HTML and individual flash elements as opposed to a big old swf file. URLs for content are also useful.