Disallow Flash Files

[lowprofilejoe]

Is this the correct way to disallow all .swf files from inclusion?
Disallow: /*swf*

[Kuldeep1952]

I am not sure if you can disallow files by extension.
You can achieve this by putting all the flash files in a
folder and disallow that folder.

[lowprofilejoe]

anyone else? Is putting all flash in their own folder and disallowing the folder, the only answer? God, that'll be a nightmare

[boltok]

It makes sense to have different types of files in different folders from the start so that these kind of issues can easily be dealt with. I keep my CSS files under a "styles" folder, javascript can go under scripts or js, and so on.

[Ladadadada]

The robots.txt "standard" is very limited. The only place it allows a wildcard is after the UserAgent: keyword.

You can list every flash file on your site individually, wherever they are.

I'm not aware of any bot that downloads flash files anyway. Have you found one ?

[lowprofilejoe]

Yes, Google will and does index swf files. Which sucks, because no ad units are being displayed, so people are viewing the swf without the html around it.

[lowprofilejoe]

Just wanted to check and see if anyone else knew of another way. Moving all my flash files will be a nightmare.

[SwapsRulez]

Yes mate, all the newer & updated bots understands non stable standard extensions such as *... but you'll have problems with other bots that doesnt understands that concept...
so you have two choices...
1) Find out all the flash files & list them in the robots.txt with the each line giving one file name in the disallow tag.
2) Move out your all flash files to one folder & disallow that perticular folder.

Cheers mate... Peace!

EDIT :
Searched for google syntax... you have to write there

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /*.swf$