Publishing and Google Search indexing and crawling

Mary_A

Business and Enterprise users can publish a sheet, report, or dashboard. My question is can these pages be discovered by Google Search indexing and crawling? These are the options I refer to:

I looked at the page source on a sheet I published. The HTML code contains no noindex tags in the header. And the Developer tools on the page find these shares to be optimized for SEO. If I share a publish an object (sheet/dashboard/report), then, a user with that URL links to it from a public website, it seems the contents of the public object could be crawled and indexed by Google.

FOR example, this sequence of events is possible:

• I publish a sheet that contains data for Amco Western division sales in 2019.
• A user gets the URL to that sheet in an email.
• The user links to that sheet in a public website --- maybe the company website or wiki he doesn't realize is public.
• Google crawls the public site, encounters the link and crawls to and indexes the sheet.
• A Google search for Amco Sales now returns my sheet for searches like "Amco Western Sales" or whatever.

Is this correct? Does Smartsheet include any means of preventing a crawl in these published objects?

Andrée Starå

Excellent!

Happy to help!

Andrée Starå

Hi Mary,

Not sure I follow!

Can you clarify?

I hope that helps!

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Mary_A

Sure thing, added more detail to the question above.

Andrée Starå

Thanks for the clarification.

If you haven’t already, I would recommend that you reach out to the Smartsheet Support Team.

Please let me know what you find out!

Mary_A

Thanks @Andrée Starå I'll give Support a call and update this.

Andrée Starå

Excellent!

Happy to help!

Chandler Julian

@Mary_A Did you ever hear back from Support on this question regarding link publishing? We're wondering the same thing, except we're only using the publishing link on a Smartsheet Dashboard that's only accessible to authenticated Smartsheet users and collaborators with whom we've shared the dashboard.

Mary_A

@Chandler Julian I did ask the question but the support person did not know the answer. I haven't pursued it further.

Andrew Paul

Thanks for sharing

Llucson

Finally, is there a danger that Google will index the published sheets or not?  Thanks