How did Google find my site?

komodosp

Hi folks

I did a search for a new site I was working on in Google and I was surprised to see that it actually showed up! At the time I didn't have a "Noindex" in there, but there are no links to this site from anywhere as it's still in development, so how did Google find it?

It is in a subdirectory of another live site that is rightfully showing up but as I said there are no links to this subdirectory.

Wierd.

donbon

They may have found you through the domain name registrar who often make this info available. This is how they found a domain i was working on. I didn't think to protect it because I thought it would not be listed anywhere.

komodosp

I just realised I had installed All in One SEO Pack (It's Wordpress) so that might have something to do with it...

Trojan

If you don't want it indexed, you can set noindex like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

or use robots.txt

There's quite a few options for how they might have found it. Your WordPress install might have pinged a service which Google indexes, and then followed.

They may have found it through a link from another site to your site (or maybe to a previous site if you used a domain that was used before). It could have been Twitter, Facebook, another blog, anything really.

As donbon said, they might even have found it via whois records.