Debunking: Toolbar doesn’t lead to page being indexed Sun, Dec 10 2006 By Matt Cutts You sometimes hear people say “I installed the Google Toolbar, and a day later, Google crawled my secret/unlinked page. Clearly installing the Google Toolbar caused that!†Then you’ll often see me post and say “No, it didn’t.†You’ll often see me point to this page that discusses how a page that you think is secret and unlinked can be crawled (hint: our addurl form is one way, referrer leaks is another). Philipp Lenssen decided to try an experiment. He created an unlinked web page in August, then visited it with the Google toolbar to see if it would be crawled. Read his description of the experiment... When I heard about his experiment, I wrote to give him some advice on how to do the experiment well: Philipp replied and offered a bet. Eventually we settled on the terms. If the hidden page showed up in our search results, I would autograph this card and send it back to him: If the hidden page (and he didn’t tell me where it was, so it could have been anywhere) never showed up in Google after a couple months, he would send a copy of his book, 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, to anyone that I chose. Google didn’t index the hidden page that Philipp visited with the toolbar, so I won the bet... The main thing is that I’m glad an experiment by a smart third party supports what I’ve been saying for a while. More details for the terminally interested. Q: What toolbar did Philipp use? A: I didn’t know until he wrote it up. It turns out Philipp used the Firefox toolbar. However, in the comments on the experiment, Ionut reveals that unbeknownst to both of us, he ran a similar experiment starting in August with the IE toolbar, with the same results.
I did this experiment a couple months back, put of a site with no links....I had outgoing links which I'm sure I clicked on so I'm sure thats how google found the site. Cutts explains it in more detail on his blog.
Not likely. Used to be that google did index just about any page they could find - perhaps to show off or something. Intranet pages and stuff like that got indexed. Haven't heard that as a problem recently. Right now they don't usually list pages that aren't linked to. I've got a site with very decent PR (homepage 6, last time I checked) and I've got reason to believe it's got decent trust as well. Still, not all pages are indexed - even if they do have at least one link to them. One hears of exceptions here and there: probably sites with very unique content. But most of the time, you need ingoing links are going to get you indexed. Outgoing links can get you noticed. But noticed isn't enough.
Does google toolbar have anything related with indexing? I do think it's 2 different things. Google toolbar is just a software, while indexing is an action, which needs googlebot to crawl your pages. I do think the experiment is a waste of time.
No, it's not a waste of time. It's one of those persistent Google myths that just refuses to go away, like the one that says Google pushes AdWords clients to the top of the rankings. What this article points out is that there is concreate evidence that this one IS a myth with no basis in reality.