Hi! I was having session on Infosek 2009 conference regarding documents, xls, pdfs and other jujcy information that can be found using search engines… How it happens?
It happens when someone needs to publish something in a rush and asks sysadmin to create a public folder on a website on which they start to put documents… It’s all right but the problem is that nobody is monitoring that folder any more and nobody is deleting files that are not in use. So search engines crawl that information and we create a disaster becouse now anyone can search within our documents. So they are not published only for a specific person that should download them but it is published for anyone…
My suggestion is – if you publish documents on a web server for your costumers to be able to download them then PLEASE monitor that directory and delete files immediately after your costumers downloaded them. Also do not use “Directory browsing” feature on web server – it will harden the possibility for search engines to find specific file – you then send to your costumers EXACT URL where specific document can be downloaded.
For this kind of activity when you need a storage space publicly available I suggest that you start using Microsoft Skydrive solution:
http://skydrive.live.com
http://www.windowslive.com/Online/SkyDrive
http://skydriveteam.spaces.live.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_SkyDrive
Luka Manojlovic 