Can Google Or Would Google Read The Name Of My Databases?

[morestar]

Good Monday members of WebProWorld.com and thank you for your time. I have a questions about Google and their relationship to my database. Do they have one?

I've seen a lot of strange things with Google bot over the years, or, something that's come from Google that seems to be able to read my forms and submit them - not to mention the fact that I can give Google-bot access to private member areas of my site (Google's own user-name) if I so choose to.

So with that said, could it or would it be possible or of Google's interest to at least read/find the name of my databases?

I ask because for some of the site's I'm playing with right now, I may want to use the same database but on different sites - the content displayed differently etc. but I have a suspicion Google may not like this practice too much...

Any thoughts are always appreciated!

[DaveSawers]

Presumably, the only place your database name exists is in code on your server. There's no need for that name to make it into the HTML code of the site so how would a search engine or anyone else discover it?.

[mjtaylor]

I would not rule out Google being able to see the name of a database, but I would put a small wager at least that says Google does not care what you name your databases.

[morestar]

See well, when it comes to fighting spam (content farms) and being a multi-billion dollar company I can't see why they wouldn't want to read the name of a database on a server.

I certainly don't know the ins and outs of major search engines, who they employ nor why they employ them but if i was a search engine so concerned about spam than I might as one of my engineers to see if it's possible to read the database name just to see if other sites on the same IP are using it.

Just a thought really...

[mjtaylor]

And what does a name have to do with relevance? Seriously. How many databases are named database1? Or db1?

[a53mp]

The only way Google will ever know your database, or even that it has a database is if you are running your site on a Google server or give Google full access to every file on your server.

Anything server side (php, asp, cf, .net, etc) is just that.. server side code. It can not be accessible unless you have access to the server.

[morestar]

OK, and would it be considered unethical on Google's or anyone's part to even try to obtain that information?

MJ, I'm talking more around the lines of content farms and so forth. If two or more sites are using the same database and offering the same content then to a degree they can be considered a content farm. Let's say Google can see that the two duplicate sites have the same database, that could push the fact that the two are connected. Of course all this if Google could read the name of your databases or figure out how to, or have the name of a site's database scanned in the crawling process somehow.

I know this may sound like a silly idea but I know it's not impossible.

[a53mp]

It would be duplicate content, which they can do now.

I just finished a project for a client where the script I wrote can serve content for an unlimited number of websites.. who's domains point to the same hosting path, and depending on the domain it will pull different content from the database. Right now there is only 2 sites but theoretically could be thousands or whatever.. all using the same DB, but all with different content. It's not just content though, it content, navigation items, pages, profiles, etc..

Wordpress MU? has the same thing though where you run multiple blogs off the same database, it just creates a bunch of tables as needed.

Some hosting only offers 1 DB, so the user is forced to use multiple tables with 1 DB.. they shouldn't be penalized for that. Content is different though.. which like I said, Google knows about

[computergenius]

Google is not magic, it can only read pages that visitors to your site can read.

If some of your coding is bad enough to allow your database name to be read by site visitors, then Google is the least of your worries!

[SemAdvance]

The only way Google will ever know your database, or even that it has a database is if you are running your site on a Google server or give Google full access to every file on your server.

Anything server side (php, asp, cf, .net, etc) is just that.. server side code. It can not be accessible unless you have access to the server.

and googlebot has access to most servers, (as does almost any crawler) where in the crawlers index the files and folders found on the server,... unless instructed otherwise, it is after all an interconnected worldwide web.....

Besides googlebot or any crawler, does not need to know the name of, or have access to a database, to catch dupe content....


.