Google & .htaccess pages

.htaccess protected pages are visible in Google?

[Panda]

...excuse me for my English, but I'm italian.

Anyone knows if Google finds pages protected with .htaccess?

Thanks, Panda

[rfgdxm1]

Obviously what you are doing isn't secure. The mere fact it is possible for Googlebot to find these means that *anyone* can.

[NameNick]

Panda,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com].

It depends on whether you set a link to those pages. But even if Google found .htaccess protected pages, it doesn't matter. As long as the Google Bot don't know username and password, those pages won't get indexed. And that means as long as you don't set username and password in the link[1] to the protected page, nothing happens.

[1] i.e.: http: //username:[e-mail]/protected/page.html

NN

[ciml]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Panda.

Google doesn't list URLs that return 403 or 404 unlesss they are /robots.txt excluded. If they are /robots.txt excluded then the URLs may be listed, but the content won't be indexed.

NameNick, would Googlebot send a username and password if you link to "username:[e-mail]"? I don't think I've seen that mentioned before.

[NameNick]

ciml,

Good question. Technically it should work and the spider should follow the link. But I don't know, whether the spiders even do so. Probably you are right and they don't follow such a links by a selfmade rule or so.

NN

[ciml]

Does anyone reading this have a username:[e-mail] link? If so, does it get crawled?