How do you stop google showing your hidden files???

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with my site and google.

For some reason, it's giving everyone links directly to our "SWF" (flash) files, instead of just the site...

We really want people to visit the site to get access to the flash content, otherwise, how will they see our adsense ads


In my robots.txt file i have this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*swf*


It's been in there for MONTHS, lol, and google just dosnt seem to care.

Am i doing somthing wrong?

Thanks for the help.

Regards.

 

google can't read flash file... well maybe if its html

and you don't have to include robots if you want google to see it..

 

Unless you have all your flash content in a folder called /*swf* that isn't going to work.

Maybe a short cut to getting it done quickly would be to use client scripting to write out your swfs. But then you want to block them properly with the robots exclusion protocol.

 

You could change the text for links to files so it is not picked up for a search term. I would not name them i would number them so they do not list the files.

 

long story short - put all of the files you don't want google to index in a folder, then disallow that same folder and that's it. You can check robotstxt.org for assistance.

 

ah, so /*swf* means exclude a directory - d'oh, i thought that was the file type

I can wait another month or two while google stops listing my swfs in its results if there is an easy way to block swf files. I dont want to move the file, or use "client scripting" (as i dont know what that is)

Could someone tell me the write robots.txt file to stop google listing swf files, but let all other search engines and google run around the rest of the site fine.

Cheers again

(rep added a.t.g)

 

If you don't have too many SWFs, you can just use Google Webmaster Tools and ask them to remove the specific URLs.

Using robots.txt do something like this:

Disallow: /*.swf$

$ = end of filename

 

Client script = java. Stuff that runs on the client, in the browser, instead of on the server.

You can use your .htaccess file to kill requests to swf files when the referrer is Google?

 

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

may solve your problem. Disallow: /*swf* will block everythink which includes swf .

visit for more info http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40367

 

Thanks for the help guys

I'll give these robots.txt a go.

Cheers.

 

also intrested

 

Did it work for you?