Are documents hosted in Marketo searchable via Google or other search engines?

[Anonymous]

Would a web user be able to find documents that we have hosted in our Marketo Design studio via websearch using google or any other search engine? 

[Anonymous]

Good morning, Emily!

Anything that you have as a live landing page could conceivably be "crawled" by Google or another search provider.  Only "approved"/live pages would be search able though.  A good way to prevent this is to add the following to your individual pages or landing page templates:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

While the "spiders" will still continue to visit the page, the information will not be indexed.

Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns!

Jesse

[Anonymous]

That makes sense - thank you for the tip! Do you know if a PDF hosted in Marketo would also be searchable?

[Anonymous]

Emily, I've found in testing this that some PDFs show up in Google.  Once Google has it, I'd recommend hosting these somewhere else if you are concerned about this.

Suppose your company name is ABC and your marketo instance is pages.abc.com.  Use these search strings in Google:

site:pages.abc.com filetype:pdf
pdf site:pages.abc.com

If anything shows up, its likely a pdf hosted in your images folder.

[Anonymous]

Ugh - some of our PDFs in the Images and Files folder are being found by Google and these are normally gated. Is there any way that Marketo can prevent PDF files it hosts from being indexed / followed? 

[Ed_Kuryluk]

I know it's 2 months later, but I'm having the same problem as Elliott. Has anyone figure out a solution? Our pdfs are stored as files in "Images and files". 

[Anonymous]

Ed you should look first at your landing pages and thank you pages.  If the PDFs are linked here and the pages are indexable then the PDFs will be indexed by Google.  You might try the no index no follow as mentioned above, use emails to send links to the PDFs, and/or use javascript to serve the PDFs

[Anonymous]

Steven, we don't have any pages with links to our PDF files that are being indexed.  We use emails to send the links.  I think Marketo is going to have to solve this.

[Cecile_Maindron]

I agree. We have same issue. Our PDFs links are distributed through Thank You Emails and yet the PDF link (that are gated) are showing up in Google Search. This is an issue for us. The discussion is quite old. Has any solution been found since?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Fully agreed this is an issue.

Here is the corresponding idea:  

-Greg