Google displaying swf menu in SiteLinks

Posted by m90 on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by m90
Published on 2012-07-04T10:12:20Z Indexed on 2012/07/04 15:24 UTC
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I have a website that uses a Flash based menu as its main navigation. A plain HTML fallback version is "lying underneath", the swf is embedded using swfobject.

swfobject.embedSWF('MENU.swf', 'menu', '1000', '600', '8.0.0', 'ext/expressInstall.swf', {}, {wmode:'transparent',bgcolor:'#666666'}, {});

Somehow Google now started displaying a link to the swf-file in the SiteLinks (noting [SWF] beforehand) which is pretty ugly as the Flash content gets all scrambled and all you see is a random string of characters and numbers (it looks "hacked" to me, although I do know it is not). Also, the link to the swf is plain useless as it relies on JavaScript-functions in the HTML-document.

I already demoted the swf in the Webmaster Tools, yet in some situations the link will still show up.

Is anyone aware of this problem (I haven't found too much on this on the Internet) and knows how I can keep the search results from linking to the swf?

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