I’ve been working on SEO and studying search engines since 2004. It’s been a while since I last had a real serious ‘wow’ moment related to search engine behavior. Today I had one such moment.
While doing some work-related searches in google, I stumbled across a URL that I 100% know isn’t linked to from any public web page. I dug around to make absolutely sure of it, but couldn’t uncover a single link or mention anywhere of the URL in question.
Then I remembered something small, which I nearly dismissed, but am now almost certain is the cause of the unwanted URL in Google’s index. A colleague of mine set his Gmail chat status to the URL in question in order to share it with a select group of people. Two weeks later, the URL is in Google’s search index. The URL is now disabled, but frankly it’s a little alarming in my opinion that Google would grab a private URL that is only shared between a small group of people, and include it in their index.
So take heed, if you don’t want Google including a specific URL in their public search index, don’t share it via Gmail chat (at least don’t set it as your status, even if it’s only shared with a few people).
