Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : SEO / SEM Discussions : Can search engines index docs in protected directories?

[cftranslate]

How reliable is password access to for example Word documents in protected directories? Are they easy to hack? Can search engines robots access and index them?

Thanks.

[PogiWeb]

I'm pretty sure search engine robots are not suppose to be accessing protected directories but the world today...

[HostSentry]

It is pretty simple really. If a person could access the word documents in a protected directory then a search engine could.

Search engines have no more access than anyone else would have. It is not like they have a magical key to read anything they want.

Some search engines might try to guess the password a couple of times (probably unlikely), but you would never see that on any major search engine... or public one really.


You also don't really mention what method of password protection this directory has.

[lamnk]

Originally Posted by cftranslate

How reliable is password access to for example Word documents in protected directories? Are they easy to hack? Can search engines robots access and index them?

Thanks.

No.

AFAIK only adsense crawler hat ability to crawl protected areas WITH permission of owner for better relevancy.