Google to index publicly published Google Apps documents, spreadsheets and presentations

Posted on 18 September 2009, at 1:13 pm, by Wayne Schulz

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google docs indexed.jpg

If you’ve been openly sharing documents that you’ve created in Google Docs then you may want to take another look at your settings just to make sure those documents are ok for public consumption. Google today sent around notice early today that in a few weeks documents, spreadsheets and presentations that you’ve explicitly published outside your organization and that are linked to from a public site will be crawled and indexed. This means they’ll appear in search results you (and the rest of the world) sees on Google.com and other search engines. Fortunately there’s a way to prevent the world from seeing next years’ company payroll spreadsheet that someone mistakenly shared publicly by setting certain administrative controls in the Google Apps Control panel. Full email after the jump.

Google Apps Sharing Options

Email notification from the Google Apps team:< br />

From: The Google Apps Team
Date: Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:02 AM
Subject: Google Apps: Important changes coming to published Google Docs

Hello Google Apps admin,

We wanted to let you know about some important changes around published documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

In a few weeks, documents, spreadsheets and presentations that have been explicitly published outside your organization and are linked to from a public website will be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. There is no change for documents published inside your organization or shared privately.

If you wish to prevent users from publishing documents to the public internet, we now offer an admin control in the Google Apps Control Panel that allows users to continue to ’share documents outside the domain’ without allowing them to publish the files to the public Internet. To change this setting, follow these steps:

- Login to your admin control panel
- Select Service Settings > Docs
- Un-check the option ‘Users can publish documents to the public internet’

If a user does not want their published Docs to be crawled, then the user must unpublish them by doing the following:

- Go to the ‘Share tab’
- For documents and spreadsheets, choose ‘Publish as web page’. For presentations choose ‘Publish/embed’
- Click on the button that says ‘Stop publishing’

For more details, please see this Help Center article: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60781

This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

Google Apps Sharing Options