Google indexed the content of my zip files

~15 mb each, wmv filename inside is listed

[danimal]

the site: command search is bringing up a list of the zipped video files on my site... google has attempted to index all of the content of each of the zip files, it's showing up as gibberish text surrounding the filename that's inside the zip file.

some of these zipped video files are showing up as what google thinks is a page full of japanese content that it attempts to translate, lol.

i can find no reference here or in the google website faqs about this capability of crawling and indexing the actual content of zip files... needless to say, it's trashing the google index with worthless data.

several weeks ago this website took an inexplicable nosedive in the ratings, so i'm also wondering if this zip issue is relevant to that.

[Brett_Tabke]

very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[kaled]

Some time ago, several .exe files from my site were indexed. This wasn't a bug, they were correctly identified by Google as Windows executables. I cannot begin to guess why Google would be insterested in .exe files and they are no longer indexed.

Google probably has the technology to recognise many file formats that they do not normally index. In this case, something probably went wrong with experimental code.

Kaled.

[Chico_Loco]

Can you check your server headers and let us know if you server is reporting the correct content-type for your zip files.

If the server is reporting them as text or other type files then that would explain something.

[2hot2handle]

Hi everybody,
The problem is OLD one. Google index .jpg .gif .zip .arj etc.

I notice Google about this.

[edited by: jatar_k at 7:02 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2005]
[edit reason] no email quotes [/edit]

[danimal]

that's a good idea... i found an online tool at the seoconsultants website, entered the full url of one of the zip files, and it returned a 404 not found error, with the content-type: text/html.

it's a reseller account on an apache server... the cpanel mime types show "application/zip zip".

[danimal]

just an update... it now appears that google has stopped listing the zip files as part of the site: search.

traffic to the site has not returned to previous levels, but i'm glad that they got the zip problem fixed.

[caveman]

Yeah, not new.

But this thread serves a great reminder: If it's on a connected server, you're choosing to share. Don't be too consoled by the fact that the file is not viewable when doing a search. Neither are all of your site's backlinks.

...all of the worlds information...

[danimal]

the zip files are linked on the webpage... i put 'em up as zips instead of wmv because it doesn't use as much bandwidth, you have to really want to see the content to go thru the zip hassle.

the point of this thread is that google does *not* post the actual content of zip files as search results... i believe that this was an abnormality that they fixed.

hopefully they will fix the bogus backlink reporting someday as well :-0