fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

(rt/bro) As with so many things related to search, mutually exclusive rumors abound a) that the Google toolbar can be used in lieu of submitting pages directly to Google, or b) that this is a mere rumor without any factual basis.

Well, here’s our take on the matter. In our experience, you can use the Google toolbar with “PageRank display enabled” to notify Google of your URLs’ existence.

We noticed this initially when Google started spidering (or, rather, requesting) admin pages which weren’t linked to internally from anywhere on our site. Neither did they have any external, incoming links – so the only way Google could have learned of their existence was the toolbar.

Obviously, this patently qualifies it as a blatant spyware tool …

Similar behavior was discovered when using the Alexa toolbar which is why we dropped it altogether from our systems.

However, when Google gets notified of a URL, this doesn’t mean they will bend over to spider and index it within a few days – this may be a common misconception but it’s nothing we can verify from actual experience. It’s just that the Google toolbar is one more possibility of prodding Google to get going and actually crawl your pages – nothing more, nothing less.

Whether they will actually spider the URL depends on a range of other factors, e. g.:
– their general crawling schedule
– has the domain been banned for some reason?
– has the IP been banned?
etc.

While Google’s receiving lots of flak for their newly introduced AutoLink feature, their toolbar begs quite a few other security issues which seem to have been widely ignored amongst all the other brouhah.

If you’ve enabled “SpellCheck” and are using it, data you enter in online forms will be sent to Google for checking. Vide in this context :

→ Google’s Privacy page.

Here, it says explicitly:

Some features, such as SpellCheck, AutoLink and Dictionary, require that the contents of the page be sent to Google.

This constitutes a prime security and privacy issue in that surfers will frequently enter sensitive data such as ids, passwords, e-mail addresses etc. in such forms.

You can deactivate the toolbar’s SpellCheck function under “Options”.

Let’s never forget that Google isn’t primarily a search engine company and actually never was – their core vested interests lie in data mining because that is where the real money is. Surprisingly, most SEO/SEM artists don’t seem to get it though it’s so blatantly obvious.

There’s so much you can do with/about Google once you’ve realized this, it’s quite amazing.

Always follow the money …

[Parts of this article were first published on:
→ SearchEngineWatch forums: “Google Toolbar Adds New Pages To Index?”]

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