How Does Google Find New Pages That Have No Backlinks
The common belief is that Google finds new pages and websites by following links from other websites. This would make sense, but recently I have had two incidents which has led me to believe that good finds new pages by tracking users sits visited OR looking for links in google mail.
This is some scary stuff for both consumers and more importantly webmasters. For consumers the privacy concern is definitely something to think about. For webmasters you can have your website indexed before its even ready.
The first time I noticed this phenomenon was with a website I was building for a friend. I created a mirror site under a new directory called test. There was no links pointing to any of these pages. One day I get a calling asking why the pages which were still unfinished are coming up in the Google results. I had a hard time explaining this, but realized that I linked to these pages in GMail exchanges.
Second instance occurred more recently. I decided to build a site about a niche topic. I have been working on this site for about a week. The domain is a few months old. Before I started the site: search did not yield anything. The copywriter I was using did not use Gmail, and I used hotmail for all exchanges about the site. Regardless, within a week my site got indexed. My uncompleted duplicate content, mess of a site is now in the index. The only explanation I have left is that Google tracks users and I may have been logged in while working on the site. If that is the case that is utter BS and I would warn any webmaster to ALWAYS log out of Google.
What do you think, have you seen something like this?
10 comments
Same feeling i too have even my domain was entirly new and with no backlinks and it got index in just 1 day with search result showing very next day…i am still surprised how google got my site….! ! !
[…] recent post I read about the possibility of Google’s spiders going through your gmail, actually sent shivers down my spine. Whether true or not, the fact is that they have the […]
I had the exact opposite issue. No matter how much I emailed or advertised my site it never got placed in the index. It took a week after the “Add my site to this crappy searchengine.com” did it finally appear. THEN, the link went to my floating iframe instead of my index page. What a crock.
Thanks for the warning I am almost always logged into Google when I’m on.
U used hotmail cuz ur copywriter didn’t know how to use gmail ??? that makes no sense to me. U can send messages from gmail to hotmail all the time !!! howcum u switched to hotmail, where u could have easily sent and receive ur mail via G. anyway im gona test the theory and comeback with sum results.
My wife is a wedding photographer. When people request her rates, she directs them to a single page on her site with her rates. We don’t want this information public for obvious reasons.
So I’m looking through her analytics and people are searching for “heather swanner wedding rates” and landing on the URL! So I googled the problem, landed on this site and it HAS to be gmail. She uses a gmail account to send people the URL.
I didn’t block the page with robots.txt, meta tags or the like - but it has ZERO backlinks, so I didn’t think it was necessary to restrict the spiders - lesson learned.
This is a little upsetting. I never thought I’d find myself waiting in vain for Google to UNlist a page! = )
You could have used the robots.txt file, or related tags to prevent Google from indexing you. In fact, you should, even if you think there are no links to you. Also, being logged in to google cannot enable them to track what you visit. They would have to actually have software running on your computer without your knowing it, which is very illegal.
I agree a robots.txt file could have solved the problem, but most people who create sites do not know about that. Just read Mr. Swanner’s example to see what kind of problems can arise.
I ran into this problem when some of my ppc landing pages got indexed because it looked like I had duplicate content.
My site got indexed which was great, but then I changed the page names as Google suggested they were not informative enough and now I can’t get the new pages indexed. I have submitted a new sitemap which has been crawled but a google search still brings up the old pages and if you click on the links it gives an error message. i don’t know how to get round this.
@ Patty
Give it some time eventually that page will be replaced. It does suck I feel your pain.
Leave a Comment