INK and Google

Does Google use the inktomi database?

[Smiley]

I have pages designed as doorways for Inktomi (through PT before they where penalised!) that are now showing up and getting traffic from Google.

Google could not have found these doorway pages by crawling the site as they has no inbound links.

So either google must look at lnk or get feedback from their toolbars? Anyone seen similar?

[tigger]

I would say google has found your ink pages by crawling your site, it's quite a busy spider :)

[Smiley]

So it can find pages that have no links to them? How does it do that?

[taxpod]

Referror logs for one thing.

[diddlydazz]

There was a discussion on whether or not Google followed links via the toolbar.

I will try and find the thread.

Here: [webmasterworld.com...]

Dazz

[Marcia]

>>Referror logs for one thing.

Here's what Google says about "secret pages" from #6 in their Tips for Webmasters [google.com].

As soon as someone follows a link from your "secret" server to another web server, it is likely that your "secret" URL is in the referer tag, and it can be stored and possibly published by the other web server in its referer log. So, if there is a link to your "secret" web server or page on the web anywhere, it is likely that Googlebot and other "web crawlers" will find it.

There really are no secrets that are 100% safe as long as there's any possibility of a link. Then, there are some webmasters around who choose sites and without asking or getting permission add them to links pages or directories. So there can be links people don't know about, especially if they've had good rankings at popular search engines.

[panicbutton]

Marcia's suggestion of a search engine finding pages with no links to them, or from log files, is certainly, ahem, interesting. I think however that the most likely reason is that - as part of the AOL/Google deal - AOL insisted that Google do a one-off ingest of Ink's database to keep AOL'ers (who may be accustomed to finding certain sites via AOL) happy. No doubt they will be scrubbed from Google in due course but they should ease the transition for AOL.

It could be a bit of a worry really, particularly if what you thought was safely quarantined from Google (for Ink's eyes only) is now showing up and may trigger a PR0!

[tigger]

panicbutton

I've had ink pages in google for sometime 12mths+, I'm sure it's just a case of following links

[Josk]

AlltheWeb has (mistakenly?) indexed ICQ, so I could see Google doing the same. All they need to is index a log file that has queries from a search engine and follow the links back to the searchengine, and onto the Inktomi-only page...

[GoogleGuy]

Uh, no. We don't use Inktomi's database. We prefer to crawl our own pages. :)