[thelist] Can the Search Engines find an unlinked page?

Bob Meetin bobm at dottedi.biz
Sun Jul 13 09:54:51 CDT 2008


Fred Jones wrote:
> I made a demo site called somesite.com/fred/
>
> There no link anywhere in the world to that page--in fact that only
> people who ever saw it are me and my client. But he wants me now to
> remove it because he says the search engines will find it and list it.
> I am not opposed to removing it, but I think he's wrong. I see no way
> for any search engine ever to find it. Am I wrong?
>
> Perhaps since he and I use gmail, Google is reading our email and
> thereby finds it?
>
> Thanks.
>   
I got to thinking about this a couple weeks back and posted the question 
to the SEO forum I use. 

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=36415&st=0&p=282378&#entry282378

The long and short of it is that the apparently 'invisible' file may be 
findable and although good bots may honor robots.txt bad ones may not. 
Is there no honor in web world!!!  As it happens setting up a simple 
password protection with .htpasswd and .htaccess for a single file or 
folder is an easy solution.  The thread goes into more detail. 

-Bob




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