[dmpinder]

I'm a bit confused as to why Google has started linking directly to .flv videos? I know from dealing with my clients that hardly any of them have the ability to locally watch an .flv video outside of a browser, so what is Google playing at?

An example is here: http://www.google.co...574888f9dc97a30 The second video (on the right) links directly to the .flv. I can view it because I have VLC and Adobe CS4 installed, but many people won't have .flv viewing software.

Does anyone know why Google has started doing this?

Currently my plan to prevent this is to use the robots.txt to disallow access to the folder with the .flvs and maybe upload a folder of .wmvs instead, which will likely have a wider acceptance rate on Windows machines.

Darren

[BlueDreamer]

It's because search bots can crawl every folder on your site. The easiest ay to stop them crawling files is to stick in a blank index.html file in every "storage only" folder (eg /images). Alternatively a robots.txt can be used to tell 'em not to index whatever folders you specify.

[dmpinder]

Hi BlueDreamer,

I'm already aware of how to stop certain files being indexed, but my question was more regarding why Google are offering links for people to download files which (in most cases) they cannot open? It would be like alienating Mac users by linking to .wmv, or alienating Windows uses by only offering .mov files.

Darren

[BlueDreamer]

I'd say it's listing it because Google has crawled the contents of your video/flv folder, it doesn't really care if you have the right software or not, all Google sees is a file that's relevent to the search .

[rallport]

You can also use some of video specific meta tags and the open graphic meta tags too to help search engines index your videos.