A D D M I N E - How Google sells your secrets to your competitors

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How Google sells your secrets to your competitors

As well as sticking their advertising into every nook and cranny on the Internet that they can reach, Google spiders and collects information. It collects every bit of information that it can get for its own use and for your competitors.

Most sites want to be found by search and willingly submit their web site to Google to be spidered so that they appear in search results. But what Google is spidering and what you think they are spidering are two different things. And the things that they do with that collected information may be a big surprise.

Firstly we are led to believe that adding tags for NO FOLLOW and using a ROBOTS.TXT file will prevent a search engine from spidering that content. Well it may prevent them from making that content available to public search results but it will not stop them from spidering what they want, and that can be a lot more than you have allowed for.

From a comment to an earlier article our attention was drawn to quite a remarkable revelation... that search engines will find more pages than what are linked from your home page. Normally spidering follows a trail of links from the hyperlinks contained in the web pages while exploring each link, and theoretically, pages that are not linked to any of those pages in the chain cannot be found. Well hang onto to hat, because they have other means of finding your web pages.

One developer while talking to his client by phone, created a new page to explain what they were discussing and gave the link to the client verbally by phone. The web page did not contain any links to other web pages and no other web pages had a link to this new page. But within minutes the developer noticed that 2 different search engines had found that new web page.

How is this possible?

Well there are a few possibilities and you won't like any of them because if you are a developer or any business that has trade secrets, then you can't be sure where the information is going, where it is stored or who or how may people have access to it. Regardless of whether the search engines are using something installed with their toolbars, or it is something installed by Windows update for terrorist tracking, you have a big gaping hole in your personal and corporate security.

Collected information

Google collects information about how many and which sites link to your site. It also collects information from its search results and click throughs to your web site. It also collects and records information about which pages are visited on your web site, when they visited and by whom. In fact they probably have more information about your online business than you get from your own web site statistics.

Google uses this information to calculate a page rank which it applies to their algorithm when providing search results. It also uses this information for their own business research and you only have to read the news to see where they are investing next. Now here's the real crunch... Google also provides that information to your competitors!

So if you want to spy on a competitor and find out how they distribute and whee they distribute, and how and where they publicize their products, all you have to do is get a list of backlinks pointing to their web site... and the information is provided for free!

Submitted by: Kendo on 2010-07-26

Reader's comments:

[Add a comment]


Herbie wrote:
	Why dont the authorities just close them down? Or are they more thrilled about finding a handful of perverts than human rights and privacy on a global scale?

Robert wrote:
	What is the world coming to? Now I have cockroaches in my pantry claiming FAIR USE!

William wrote:
	Google invades privacy
	If you are a Google Adwords advertiser then you will be pleased to know that your advertising account information is made available for the world to see. So if you are impressed by the fact that your competitors are spying on you, then be more impressed by the fact that the idiots at Google make it easier for them. If you go to keywordspy.com, a site provided by cockroaches for other cockroaches, then you will see how the big cockroach (Google) makes it easy to get a list of which keywords that you pay for, how much you pay and your monthly budget. Maybe now you will be impressed as much as I am about how Google protects our privacy. There seems to be many sites like the spy site mentioned above, and they all have access to your Google account stats.

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