Hi everyone, So I've got an arcade that's ranking very well for a particular game's name. As of this writing, it currently ranks #4. The only problem is, the flash file from the page ranks directly above the page it's embedded in at #3. My dilemma is this. I was thinking about changing the name of the game file to deliberately produce a 404 error, then redirect the 404 error pages to my homepage. This would mean all the traffic going directly to the flash file would be redirected to the homepage where they can play the game from. Traffic going directly to the flash file is just eating my bandwidth. Is this something that may get penalized? I don't want to lose the rankings as it brings in a pretty good income. Any insight appreciated, boxer126
i would just tell google to deindex that file and put Disallow: /swf-folder/ PHP: in your robots.txt you don't want swf's to be indexed.
Thanks zodiac. It's that simple? Learning all about Robots.txt is my next quest. Thanks again. -boxer126
You will get penalized if you have 404 error for long time. But you could use a 301 redirect, which tells the crawlers that this page is permanently removed to this new location. 301 are not penalized.