Google indexing site content that I did not wish to be indexed

[David-E-Carey]

Hi is it pretty standard for Google to index content that you have not specifically asked them to index i.e. provided them notification of a page's existence.

I have just been alerted by 'Mention' about some new content that they have discovered, the page is on our site yes and may be I should have set it to NO INDEX but the page only went up a couple of days ago and I was making it live so that someone could look at it and see how the page was going to look in its final iteration.  Normally we go through the usual process of notifying Google via GWMT, adding it to our site map.xml file, publishing it via our G+ stream and so on.

Reviewing our Analytics it looks like there has been no traffic to this page yet and I know for a fact there are no links to this page. I am surprised at the speed of the indexation, is it a example of brand mention? Where an actual link is now no longer required?

Cheers

David

[SamuelScott]

Are you asking how to prevent certain pages from appearing in search results? If so, I'd review Moz's guide to robots.

Specifically, I'd recommend the use of both the noindex meta tag and the robots.txt file. Good luck!

[David-E-Carey]

Hi Samuel,

Thanks for replying but no I'm not asking that, this I know how to do. The question is about whether this could be seen as an example of page indexation where on my part there has been no explicit activity to inform Google of the content's existence and there are no links to it yet Google is still managing to index it. Why bother informing Google vIA some of the activities mentioned earlier when they will just index it anyway you know.

Thanks

David

[TammyWood]

Google is constantly indexing and viewing your website. Why go through the other steps? To ensure that your new page isn't overlooked. While you don't necessarily need to tell Google to index in GWT - your site map should automatically update, and if referenced in the robots.txt file than the new page will be found without issue.

Now, again if you don't want a page indexed and it has links than you need to do the noindex / no follow on the page, as the robots.txt can be over-ruled.

[CandymanKen]

Hi David-

We had a similar situation recently where we had a dev site and forgot to no-index it and actually started to appear in the SERPS. After a bit of puzzling it LOOKS like Google found (or at least indexed)  the pages as a function of us being logged into our Google accounts when viewing them. We did not do extensive testing on this, its mostly anecdotal but ti did look like it was true. Maybe we'll do the experiment one day to be sure!

Ken

[David-E-Carey]

Thanks Candyman, yes this is not a question about to prevent Google for not indexing my content, I know this very well. It is more about how quick they have done this with the least amount of effort on our part to inform them.

Plus it is quite an interesting situation you found yourself in, never heard of this before.

Many thanks

David