Loosing Site

In about two weeks time Google will start crawling, indexing, and displaying in search results any Google Apps documents that are published and linked to from a public web site.

In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the ‘Publish as web page’ or ‘Publish/embed’ option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn’t apply if it’s only set to ‘Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)’. If you don’t want your published docs to be crawled, then you can un-publish them by doing the following:

Published docs will be crawlable soon – Google Docs Help

This is an excellent opportunity for press releases, reports and presentations to find a wider audience. It’s also means businesses might want to pay more attention to the themes used in their documents, incorporating their own branding elements.

Google Docs Help: Styles In Google Docs – a knol by Google Docs Guide 2 via kwout

Some have expressed concern that private or draft information will now be viewable by the public. Though I’m sure far more are unsurprised by the meaning of the term “publish”.

Tags: Google, apps, docs, publish, search, crawl