Published Google documents will soon appear in Search engines

Some good news for Google Docs users. In about two weeks from now Documents stored in google docs and linked from a public website can be crawled and indexed.That means the google documents are likely to appear in search engines

The search bots cannot crawl and index  documents stored at google docs because all the documents are blocked via robots.txt.This is true even if you have made your documents Public. If you search for any Google document you are presented with only the google docs homepage :

But Google employee Marie has announced in a blog post that in two weeks published Google documents that are linked from a website can be crawled and indexed. The resulting documents will then appear in the Search result pages.

The Good news : The published documents that are linked from a webpage will reach a wider audience.  You can search for documents, presentations etc in all the major search engines.

The bad news : Suppose you had published a document long ago and don’t want  others to view it.Now if any friend of yours has the link to that document and he links your document from any blog/website then your google document will appear in search engines. The privacy of Published google documents is a concern over here.

If you do not want  your google documents to be indexed here is a simple step to follow.Open Google docs and browse to your google document.Go to the share tab and click on “Stop publishing”

If you are a Google apps user and cannot unpublish  your document chances are there that the administrator of your domain has disallowed publishing outside the domain. Please check your Domain’s administrator.

Note : Digital inspiration has written a wonderful article on Indexing your google documents via Slideshare.

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