Google Search
Amazing what you can do with Google.
This weekend I’m going through the members area of a newly released Clickbank product which was heavily promoted this week and I didn’t even pay for it.
Now I’m not a fan of stealing other people’s hard work but I don’t like spending money on IM products that I don’t need either. I just figured I’d take a look so I could do an unbiased review from the point of view of someone who ‘bought’ the product.
Now this may be a blessing of sorts to me, but to the product owner, I’m sure they won’t be so pleased to know I downloaded their ebook and browsed through their members area looking at their videos and so on. Sowweeee!
If only it hadn’t been for their carelessness this would have never happened. With a little knowledge of how Google works they could have prevented all the pages on their site including the private members area from being indexed. Luckily, not everyone knows this so they’re still going to get sales.
So using a little operator that I use to know if my site or maybe an individual post has been indexed, I can find all the pages on a merchant site that has been indexed.
The operator – Site:www.somesite.com
This shows you all the pages on a site that is in Google’s index. You could use this to do a lot of research that would be productive to your business (not the mischief I’ve been up to.)
How They Could Have Prevented It
Now they could have prevented their members area from being crawled and indexed by the Googlebots by giving them proper instructions in the form of a robots.txt file.
They could have also password protected the directory or web pages used for the members area by using tools included in their cpanel or by using DLGuard which fixes a whole lot of problems they would otherwise have.
All in all, I don’t feel too guilty, knowing that if its in Google’s index and I know how to find it, then its pretty much their problem to do something about it before the whole world finds out.
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