Thread

I have a quick question and hate to post something so simple on the forums.

I need to know if my back-end system login is suppose to be showing up in search engines or if it is, should I be worried?

Currently the login is showing up in yahoo and google. Of course I would prefer if this was hidden no matter how safe my login information is. I’m mostly worried about my system folder directory being revealed.

How can I go about hiding this information from any search results? I’m not sure if .htaccess Disallow is the right approach or if it’s easier than this.

Thanks for your help!

It should not be showing; do you have it linked on the front-end of your site?  I’d recommend renaming the system directory after ensuring there are no public links from your site.

Google and Yahoo also respect the robots.txt file so you could use that as well.

Thanks for the fast response Lisa!

But I have already renamed the system root to something else and the login is not linked anywhere from my site.

Google for some reason has still cached this and is accessible to all.

I have Disallowed the renamed ‘system’ folder, but any Joe could locate my /robots.txt file and see all files or folders that have been listed. At that point just in what you see the voila they see the login..

I’ll be more than happy to show you so you can see the problem..

Brian - what do you mean it is still accessible to all? If you renamed the system directory then Google’s link should just 404.

Just to be clear - Google and Yahoo can’t read minds; if the link is in their search engines then it was linked from somewhere.  The other thing that we’ve seen (though not in a few years) is that sometimes those with Google Toolbar end up with links in Google that are unexpected; I am not sure that a link was ever verified but we saw it in a few posts, so if you are running that you might disable it.

In any case, where that link came from is what you need to find out for sure.  And if the link from Google is working after renaming the directory then it needs to be renamed again - the old one should be 404’ing.

I will rename and try again

Thanks for your help on this matter

My pleasure; if this does happen again I’d seriously consider finding out where the link is coming from.  It is definitely not normal.

If it does come up again please start a new thread - do link to this one so we can have a closer look.

Thanks!