Googlebot reading flash?

[sdang]

I have site where googlebot has indexed the index.html file and a flash file:

/index.html
/flash/menu.swf

There are also other html files and I recently added a text link within the index.html file to the other html files as well as a site map with links to every page.

/index.html
/foo.html
/foo2.thml
/flash/menu.swf

What's weird is that I am seeing in my log file googlebot trying to find the other html files within the /flash folder.

i.e. my log reads:

...."GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 204 .........
...."GET /flash/foo.html HTTP/1.0" 404 212 ..........

Why would the bot go into that folder when there are no links leading it there? I double checked my links with the index.html and the site map and none of them point to the /flash folder (except for the menu.swf file).

Thanks,
S

[doc_z]

Google is reading the addresses from the getURL command in the swf files. The problems arises because Google is handling them incorrectly. Instead of taking the links relative to the HTML file which includes the swf file, googlebot is looking relative to the the swf files. (As far as I remember some very old browsers have the same problem.)

You can solve the problem either by using absolute links in the swf file (getURL) or by placing the swf file in the same folder as the corresponding HTML file.

[GrinninGordon]

Yup, they are, and yet another way to get a useful internal link it is too ;-)

[Made In Sheffield]

If you don't know what absolute links are it just means you need to use:

/foo.html

in your getURL instead of

foo.html

Cheers,
Nigel

[sdang]

Cool thanks everyone for the quick response! I'll go ahead and modify the flash code. Hopefully the bot will come back and crawl the other pages with my new text links and sitemap html file.

-s

[doc_z]

If it's not too much effort (for changing HTML code), I would rename the new swf file. I'm not sure if Google is updating the content (links) of swf files regularly. Therefore, creating a new file (i.e. different file name) might be helpful.