How Does Google Find Pages That Don’t Have Links?

Unlike the other search engines, Google seems to be particularly great at finding content you wouldn’t think they’d be able to find – like areas of your website that have no links pointing at them at all. It’s another Matt Cutts Webmaster Help Q&A video, and this time he covers two questions in one.

Matt goes over some basics first, stating that it is possible that there are links to this un-linked content from outside sources that you may not know about. Because, when you run a link:example.com search you’re not seeing all the links Google has indexed. Which, yes, seems very unlikely. If there’s no links to your content on your own website, how would someone else know it was there to link to? But given the volume of strange bots out there doing all sorts of strange automated things with other people’s content, it’s not that much of a stretch.

Then Matt delves into the second part of the question, covering how Googlebot sometimes deals with search fields and forms with drop down menus it finds on web pages. Which is – to test them out and see where they go, picking a choice from the drop down at random, possibly indexing what they find. Resourceful!

I’ll also mention another way to get Google to rapidly index content that has no links to it: Embed a YouTube video from the Google Webmaster Central Channel on one of the pages. Googlebot will be by lickety-split to check it out!

Of course none of this information is particularly useful for basic SEO, as un-linked content isn’t going to come up in search results very often – if at all.