Comment by finger
4 hours ago
Am I misunderstanding something, or isn’t this a non-issue, as people shared those links publicly for google to find them?
4 hours ago
Am I misunderstanding something, or isn’t this a non-issue, as people shared those links publicly for google to find them?
Not quite. People shared these links but there was no indication that the links were accessable without the url. Google docs has a similar system where you can make a link to your doc and only people with that link can see it. But in this case the convo was made publicly findable just by making the link
It's up to them to tell Google to not index those pages, either via <meta> or X-Robots-Tag http header. Once accidentally indexed they have to tell Google via search console to reindex them to actually get it out of the index.
Somehow this keeps happening, followed by a rediscovery of this ancient old knowledge.
While you're absolutely right, the pronoun "they" is unnecessarily load-bearing here. Most people who are sharing links have no control over the HTML code or HTTP headers, nor are they aware of the Google Search Console.
And you're talking about relieving a symptom on a well-behaved and well-documented public service. Getting indexed by Google indicates that a link has already been crawled, indexed, and scraped by a lot of services, most of which cannot be seen or controlled by ordinary mortals.