GOOGLE alert

[Lankypeters]

I did a Google search for info on pornstar Logan Stevens and a post I made on this site came up as a possible link.

 

Of course the post I did here was signed with my sign-in name and there were no details in what I wrote that might reveal my actual identity.

 

But I advise everyone to be careful what you say or reveal here, particularly if it's something that could be traced to you, something you would not want anyone to know -- including your presence here as a poster. This site is not private. I don't suspect I ever thought it was. But a word of caution may be useful to posters.

 

And unless you're totally public about "hiring," I advise you not to sign up as working guys on FaceBook, Twitter or other similar sites. Consider what you post there as public as a story in the NYTimes.

[doitb4ugo]

Thanks

 

Thanks for the heads-up...while like you I think I already knew this, I am now going to be more careful with what i seen about me here. I did not consider that people not on this ite would be able to look at my profile and activity, even though I new they could.

[lookin4hotties]

google

 

You're so right. Anything on the MC can end up

being cached by Google and then turn up on

a Google search.

It's crazy -- just search on Google for an item

like "411 on Brett Holt"

with or without quotes, and that thread (from the Deli)

comes right up on Google. Even without quotes, it

comes up as the FIRST search result, out of about

96,500 search results. Google's computers must

love the MC as much as we do...

 

Lookin4hotties

[Lankypeters]

following a trail

 

Consider how even casual comments may be traced to you. Let's say, for instance, you saw "South Pacific" in NYC last week and told several of your friends you thought the guy who played Joe Cable was really hot.

 

Then you post here that you saw "South Pacific" in NYC last week and the guy who......etc. If that post comes up on Google, anyone who sees it -- friends, family -- may make connections.

 

No problem if you're open about everything you do. Something to think about if you're not.

 

Before I knew what Twitter was all about, a working guy here signed up to follow me on Twitter. No problem, I thought. Then when I started using Twitter, the first thing I noticed was his pic, in full and hot leather gear, as one of my followers. There was a link to his site posted with the pic.

 

Again, consider how much you want family, friends and professional associates to see.

[josephga]

Stuff you post on the craigslist is also cached by google and turns up on google search for a limited time.

[Lookin]

As a long-time Google user, I noticed that posts in the Message Forum started showing up on Google at about the same time the new site software was introduced last year. Before that, I rarely, if ever, saw anything from the Message Forum show up in a Google search. For example, if you use Google to search for "Oliver's pool party", you'll find a post for this year's event, but you won't find any for the years when the old software was in use. And your Logan Stevens post was also made after the new software was introduced.

 

My understanding is that Google uses a robot called a "web crawler" to pore through websites and index them for inclusion in their search results. Most webmasters like it when the Google bot shows up because they really want their web pages to show up in Google searches. It means new viewers coming to the site and can increase business, donations, and buzz.

 

But other webmasters don't especially want their sites to show up in Google search results. If they want Google to pass by their site without collecting information, they can create a file called robots.txt that tells Google not to index the site, or at least not to index certain portions of the site. The simplest robots.txt file looks like this:

 

User-agent: *

Disallow:/

 

It tells Google, and all other well-behaved web crawlers, not to index anything on the website. So nothing from the website will show up in Google's search results, unless it's referred to on another website somewhere. (Of course, a web crawler can ignore a robots.txt file but most of the big ones, including Google, comply.)

 

My theory is that the old Message Forum software had a robots.txt file that told Google to stay away, and the new software doesn't. Maybe it was just overlooked when the new software was introduced. Or maybe Daddy wants some new traffic on the Message Forum. I'm sure Daddy or Deej can shed some light.

 

Personally, unless there's a reason why Daddy really wants Message Forum posts to show up in Google searches, I'd hope that a simple robots.txt file could be created to keep Google from crawling around in our knickers. I know there's no such thing as privacy on the web, but it couldn't hurt to at least pull the shades down a little.