Does Google Toolbar Help Index Content?
The answer to the question above is NO.
Another myth was debunked as Matt Cutts as he explains that installing Google Toolbar doesn’t index pages by virtue of the presence of Google Toolbar.
In an article quoted from Information Week:
But thanks to Google (NSDQ: GOOG), there’s no need to guess the URL. It can be found using the inurl: search query operator with mms2legacy as the argument.
The reason for this, explained Ken Simpson, CEO of anti-spam company MailChannels, is that one’s Google Toolbar may be configured to pass URLs that one visits to Google for indexing. “If you run Google Toolbar, it knows pages you visit,” he said.
As Google explains in its Google Toolbar privacy policy, “Certain optional Toolbar features operate by sending Google the addresses or other information about sites when you visit them. Web History, PageRank, and Safe Browsing in Enhanced Mode all work this way.”
The way for Google to crawl and eventually index content is to ensure that the page gets linked from somewhere and not through Google Toolbar.
2 Comments
What would be interesting is if Google Trends utilized the G Toolbar data, then produced a content page (e.g. Hot Trends) with a link to that site, which was then crawled by Google bot.
Of course this assumes that Google bot crawls Google Trend data, and also assumes that Google Trends utilizes the Toolbar data, which I'd suspect it does. Lastly, there would need to be enough traffic to the site to provide enough data to Google Trends worthy enough to be features somewhere (which is probably unlikely if it's a "hidden" site)
I think the more interesting question here would be, what does Google use the Toolbar data for? b/c you know it does a ping back to Google for each site you visit regardless if you doing a search.