So your private love letters may appear in Google within two weeks… is this a privacy issue or SEO’s next move?

While some are worried about privacy issues from Google crawling all of their personal Google Docs, we’re already thinking of ways in which this can be used for search engine optimization. Find out how to keep your private Google Docs private and how to use them for SEO once the big update takes place -

There’s an interesting post in the Google Docs help forum that indicates your Google Docs will soon be crawlable by the Googlebot and possibly all other search engines.  Googler “Marie” says that in about two weeks, Google will be launching the change to make this happen.

What this means is that it will allow your published documents to appear in the search engine result pages as long as the document is linked from a publicly crawled webpage.  As a result, your documents can now reach a much wider audience of people.  Does this mean that you can now optimize your webpages through published Google Docs?  With a little creativity, we certainly think so!

This approach of SEO is very similar to some of our existing products which we use to ‘blanket’ the search result pages for our advertisers through hosted article pages.  With these, we can essentially create mini sites about our advertiser’s websites and get them ranking as well for all of their keyword phrases.  The end result is that our advertiser’s website doesn’t only show up on a top 3 spot of Google, but lots of smaller mini sites about our advertiser can show up and cover the rest of the search result listings on page 1 of the Google results.

Although this seems like good news to most, others are still confused by it and are under the impression that all of their private documents from Google Docs will now be visible online.  For example, user ‘byronl’ commented on the post with:

In two weeks?? That seems incredibly short notice for such a big change. IMO, users who have “private” but published documents are going to be quite upset to find they are suddenly being indexed by Google! It would be much better if I could CHOOSE whether or not my documents should be indexed.

While the above statement may be incorrect since Google requires you to have an inbound link coming to your document before it can be crawlable by Googlebot, user ‘Uncle Bob’ commented that even with this requirement, his documents could be exploited and published by anyone who knows the URL of his published documents by pointing an inbound link from any publicly crawled webpage:

If someone who knows the URL for my published document, they can link to it from their own publicly crawled webpage, thwarting my attempts to avoid having it crawled.  That means that I’m at the mercy of anyone who gets their hands on the URL for my published Doc.

Would be far better if I, the creator of the Google Doc I’ve published, could explicitly choose  a “don’t crawl” setting.

Your plan, as I understand it, leaves it open to malicious people – maybe someone who I think is a “friend” is not and exposes my Doc to crawling.

The same concern was expressed by a writer on the web.

So you’ve closed the front door of the cage and left the back door wide open.  The lion could soon be on the loose.

- U Bob

If you’d like to find out how we can have your website listed at the top of the search engine results you can contact us.  To read more about Google Docs being crawlable online, you can follow the post here.