UsefulConcept

I was just looking at Matt Cutts blog and noticed he mentions that google is now indexing content found only by submitting form fields.  It seems they just started to, and only do so for some sites right now, but it is an interesting development. For good or bad, depending on the page content and need of the web site.

Matt lists an example of a drop down with countries to select before moving to an inside page.  Another example is many sites have a jump to box saying something like "I want to:" with values in the box.  I see this often in municipal web sites.  I want to renew my license, pay my parking ticket, look up my property tax assessment, etc. 

So everyone should check their robots.txt file for sites that may be indexed this way and ensure they are up to date.

Which reminds me of a somewhat related item.  I recently saw a site with an admin area that wasn't password protected.  It was still under development, but publicly available if you knew the IP.  Anyway, though there was no link to the admin pages, a search engine must have found a path to it, and it promptly followed every 'delete record' link it found. Presto, no data in the site. :-)  We should not assume that search engines wont find our content and thus its ok.  It we want them to stay away or not index we need to explicitly let them know. And, as Todd notes below we should propertly protect them!

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