Is there a way to tell how Google found a page?

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Forums › IT Pro and developers › Is there a way to tell how Google found a page?

Behodar

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#298804 18-Jul-2022 08:22

Morning,

We have a couple of test pages on our site which aren't shown in the navigation and don't appear in the site map. They're not linked from anywhere and you need to know the direct URLs to get to them.

Despite that, they've somehow ended up in the Google search index. Does anyone know whether there's a way to find out how Google got its mitts on the pages? If they're not linked from anywhere then how in the world does Google know they exist?

RunningMan

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#2943285 18-Jul-2022 08:39

Harvested from a link sent to/from a gmail address?

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michaelmurfy

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#2943288 18-Jul-2022 08:48

Does anyone who accessed these pages use Google Chrome?

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
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freitasm

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#2943292 18-Jul-2022 08:54

Are you using Cloudflare?

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Behodar

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#2943294 18-Jul-2022 08:58

Just to clarify: We've been through some guesses already. If there's no way to actually tell (e.g. some feature hidden somewhere) then so be it, but I was just hoping that there was a way.

No Cloudflare.

freitasm

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#2943297 18-Jul-2022 09:04

Behodar:

No Cloudflare.

For anyone reading this in the future, if you are using Cloudflare: Crawler Hints Update: Cloudflare Supports IndexNow and Announces General Availability

This might submit pages even without a link from anywhere else or from a sitemap.

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timmmay

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#2943304 18-Jul-2022 09:40

Put them into your robots.txt as excluded if you don't want them indexed. People can read the robots.txt and find the pages, but anything sensitive should be properly secured.

outdoorsnz

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#2943310 18-Jul-2022 09:57

Is it possible that your web app / CMS has SEO installed code that alerts google when you publish the page?

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