Hello, I was on facebook today and I noticed something really strange. If you have a facebook account, check out your profile. You will notice that it has page rank. How is it possible that a private profile is given page rank?
because of the dofollow tag to the link going to your face book page. but if you dont want the search engine spider to crawl your restricted page you can place a robot txt that has a no follow tag.
Google should not index password protected pages, but it might do it if you have not that mentioned robots.txt or as a result of poor coding. As in example, if your only protection is Javascript, Google will not index anything beyond the login page but the content might be available through its cache. I have seen password protected forums which content is also indexed by Google but not available to you without registering when you link on the results page. The most advisable is either encrypt your protected pages to avoid get search engines crawling them, and/or move your protected content to a secure area within your site, which requires you have a SSL certificate and ability to install it.
google can not crawl password protected pages. as for facebook profiles, it's available to the public and no password is needed so it's fair game.
Sorry if i am still ignorant about Facebook. But where can i find the option to enable my pages to be found by SE? thanks TP