Internet: Articles: Could the Google Spider Destroy Your Site?

• For most website owners, many of their search engine optimization efforts are aimed at getting Google's spider to visit their website on a regular basis..... In a case of "be careful what you wish for", a website owner experienced the full wraith of the [GoogleBot]Create? recently. After engaging a web development firm to implement a content management system for their existing website, a month of painstaking development was swiftly undone when Google's spider essentially killed the newly re-developed web site.... The spider is designed to follow each hyperlink on a page, including those with "Delete Page" in the title. The net result; [GoogleBot]Create? systematically went through the site and deleted everything.

This is hilarious! A friend who worked at IBM in the good old days of room sized computers had a small placard from IBM on his desk, it only had one word on it: "Think"

This article doesn't give any solutions for how to avoid this problem, so let me give a couple of very simple things to keep in mind:

1. Keep commands with disasterous consequences behind a login, or otherwise unspiderable place.
2. Use form buttons instead of links for thinks like edit, save, etc. Form buttons are generally not spiderable.

 - Garnet, developer of Free Hive Wiki, Chat11