Google started indexing, I wasn't ready

[selfbuilder]

I've been putting a new web site together and uploading the progress to the domain so that my copywriter can see it.
One day my copywriter mentioned that we were on Google's first page with a certain keyword.

Seeing as there were only two of us viewing it at that time, and no other sites or people were aware of its presence,
I'm wondering how Google managed to discover the site and start indexing it?

[tamecrow]

Do either of you have the Google Toolbar installed? This alerts Google to every site you visit.

[selfbuilder]

Do either of you have the Google Toolbar installed? This alerts Google to every site you visit.

I do indeed have Google's Toolbar installed within the superb Firefox 3.

Thanks for your speedy reply tamecrow

[tamecrow]

No problem - you may want to place a robots.txt file on the server to disallow crawling of the domain/subdomain and password protect the folders as a safeguard.

[false]

I wish I had a similar problem. I am trying to get a new site indexed by Google and nothing seems to have worked. I used all the standard tricks including adding to adWords, adding adSense, Analytics, Webmaster Tools code properly. Still not one page is indexed.

[Niche]

Also depends on who your hosting accountis with. Some hosting accounts automaticallyput you in their directory
A friend's website was indexed while it had a coming soon page up and no links

[ArthurNYC]

I have seen that in the past but I assume that they were accessing newly registered domains from a whois directory or something. But the toolbar makes sense.

A

[BSmithTTS]

Google says it doesn't.
Debunking: Toolbar doesn’t lead to page being indexed

And as a test, I have a start page that is used with our company internally only and is not for public use... but is not hidden from public view, if someone happened across it, it would not be a big deal.

We all use the google toolbar on various browsers... I can't find the page in the SERPs.
I disagree... I think it got leaked.

Any third party services installed on the site? (tracking, counters, ads, etc)
Wouldn't happen to be a cms with rss features on it?

[cgrantski]

Last time I experienced this, I made a page with no links to it and browsed to it within a minute of making it. The next day I saw Googlebot in the log, visiting that page with a time stamp of 20 minutes later. I don't see how it can be anything other than Google Toolbar, no matter what Google says. That may have been true in 2006 when Matt Cutts wrote the debunk post.

[SemAdvance]

Google (like most search spiders) crawls servers, and happen to follow the links on the pages it finds there.

It does not need a toolbar. Just needs a link to a site existing on the server and in time it will crawl the entire server.

Depending whether or not a robots.txt file is installed at the root and validated as properly formatted the search spiders should read & follow the instructions within.

Hope this helps,

;->