SWF content and robots.txt

swf, robots.txt, google index, removal request, sandbox

[rob1m1982]

Hi,
There have been a thousand posts about SWF and robots.txt but no answers after someone has tried this.

So, here goes... About 2 weeks ago I decided to add meta data description and title tags for SEO purposes to a PHP page with a swf files embedded in it (its a flash based site). Less than 2 days later, the site was showing the meta description and the title tags in googles SERPs. The .swf file has nothing in it as it is used to load other swf files. Google seems to have returned the contents of the swf file yet again (which is just the controls for an audio player). I requested a removal of the url that contains the flash file and added a robots.txt rule forbidding search engines to access it.

Now, my question is: Will google take the entire site out of the SERPs or will it return the correct title tags and meta description? Does anyone have experience with this? Your help would be greatly appreciated.

[jeffposaka]

Did you block the url or the .swf ?

[rob1m1982]

I removed the url/directory that the file sits in and I blocked the actual .swf file in robots.txt. Thanks.

[jeffposaka]

You might want to keep the page up with the titles and meta description, then just block .swf from being crawled and see if it works.

Additionally, I like to wrap .swf files with SWFobject so I can provide alternative version of the content that is embedded into the Flash.