While sipping my favored vanilla-flavored coffee and reading the news in my inbox, an interesting tidbit caught my eye: Google will soon be crawling data and URLs found in forms or hidden behind the codes to deliver “more relevant” information to users. They have this new technology that will soon be able to reach what used to be forbidden to them.

A snippet of a news article by David Utter from WebProNews can explain more clearly what this controversial update is all about:

Google thinks it can present better results to searchers by having access to the URLs behind forms, improving the site’s exposure in the process. The Google Webmaster Central blog promised their crawls will be well-behaved:

Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent, the ever-friendly Googlebot, always adheres to robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives. That means that if a search form is forbidden in robots.txt, we won’t crawl any of the URLs that a form would generate. Similarly, we only retrieve GET forms and avoid forms that require any kind of user information.

You can read more from David’s article…

This new development from Google raises a lot of questions from people concerned with keeping corporate data private as much as possible. And even when Google tries not to do evil… how can we be sure Google will only be the only one capable of this? What if others acquire the same technology and will decide to use for less than noble reasons? The costs of losing that kind of information are greater for corporations than consumers.

Read more on this article at SEOChat: Google’s Latest Moves in Information Indexing