Published notes protected from search engines?

[Vartas 2]

Can search engines such as Google, Bing and find and index my notes and other people search their content?

 

I could not find any such option in "Publish to web" functionality. I there such an option made or planned?

 

I checked quickly the HTML source on one of my published page, and could not find any search engine indexing prevention there. Maybe my technical skill are not enough to detect it.

 

[gazumped 12,057]

Your notes are secure from external access unless you choose to share them.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360053591694-Share-a-note-via-public-link

There's also an app called Postach.io which will convert a notebook into a published blog-like website.

[Vartas 2]

Thanks @gaszumped, but that did not answer to my question or alleviate my concerns.

I have shared quite many of my notes with Share\Publish to Web over the years (which do not expire?).
So yes, they can be accessed by external users if they gain the share links.

But the question is:
Can search engines index my shared/published notes via the links, and thus share the contents to wider public?

I have old customers, partners, etc which might have my share links in their emails, computers and who knows where they have shared them forward or stored them. 
Once the search engines index content, it's very hard to get the content out from there if you don't own the content domain.

[gazumped 12,057]

If you share your notes by email,  then only the person with that address can see the share.  You have the option to allow them to invite others to see the same note,  and they can presumably pass on that 'share and invite' status to others.   If you publish notes or notebooks by sharing the URL then anyone with that URL can see the note,  and anyone to whom you share the note can pass on the URL.  The only way to stop sharing the content is to stop sharing the note. 

At no stage are the notes shared with search engines,  or available to search engines,  so they are not indexed in that way.

[PinkElephant 8,780]

@Vartas It is very simple: Because nobody knows what search engines can or can not do, you won’t get an definite answer.

From my search experience I have never hit a shared note coming up as part of a search result. This doesn’t mean it’s not there, but given the usual number of search hits going into the millions, if it is there, it is probably buried somewhere in the lowest ranks.

Independent from this shares can be forwarded by the initial recipients, so sharing means as well giving up control. I don’t share without setting limits to what I do (described in another forum post answering another post from you) and when to remove the share.

As already advised, clean up whatever loose ends you have dangling from sharing history, and then apply better privacy policies.

[Vartas 2]

@PinkElephant Thanks for sharing your experience that you have not noticed Evernote notes ending up as Goole search results.

@gazumped @PinkElephant Yes, it is very understandable that share Url is out of my control. And I can stop sharing my notes at any point -> the note cannot be accessed from that point forward by outsiders. But my main concern is that if search engines have been able to access share Urls before disabling sharing and have already indexed the contents of those notes (i.e moved content to their databases)? In that case I cannot prevent the note contents from showing up by Google/Bing/etc search results.

As en ex-web developer I understand well that search engines can be adviced not to index Html page content. There are multiple techniques for that. All legal search engines obey those directives in the web page or by the website.

My questions are:
Does Evernote use the indexing prohibitions in the 'Publish to web' shared notes?
Have they done so in the past?

I personally, and the company I work for, have shared hundreds of note Urls to trusted parties since 2014. Parties were trusted at that time, but might not be any more since contracts and customer-provider relationships have expired over time. Notes do not contain business critical information, more like meeting memos, etc. But it would be nice if the contents were not searchable by the public.

[gazumped 12,057]

23 minutes ago, Vartas said:

My questions are:
Does Evernote use the indexing prohibitions in the 'Publish to web' shared notes?
Have they done so in the past?

For any definitive answer please contact Evernote direct - we're only other users around here.  Even Evernote's new owners may not be able to deal with past history - the service has been around for 20 years or so and has been hosted by various companies.  To the best of my belief all notes are behind strong firewalls,  published or not.  To gain access you must be an approved guest,  or be in possession of a publicly shared URL.  Even so,  AFAIK the notes are not indexed anywhere.  I have published notes under both categories and have consistently been unable to find them with web searches since forever.  

[Vartas 2]

Thanks @gazumped, that's an reassuring experience. I have similar experiences, but cannot be sure since we have hundreds of shared notes over the years, and some of those notes have been deleted since.

I had a feeling that some Evernote users are concerned about the privacy of their publicly shared notes. That's why I decided to ask first here.
Plus I wanted to know if there is a hidden feature to prevent search engines, or documentation about it, or some way to check it universally, which I was not able to find with my Google searches. Apparently there is not.

I think I'll ask next from the Evernote support. As a paying user I should be able to get some answer from there. 
I think Evernote users overall deserve to know how search engines treat their publicly shared notes if the links get exposed to search engine indexers somehow.

[Dave Green 261]

I just shared (and later unshared) a note without limiting to specific users.  This is the URL:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/93738337-f079-43a0-92ad-2d4950d1968b/dmVg1YsJ9PnnJOZ9P9KU24fY111RySWIK_hfbxbS6M9iflcjRBij455pTg

I would note that that the search engines are allowed to crawl www.evernote.com for content since they want evernote to be found.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/robots.txt exists and allows some scanning but not the path with sh  (https://www.evernote.com has same robots.txt)

Even with permission, the search engines are not going to (very unlikely to) discover the long string to fetch the content as long as there no other scannable pages that link to this page.    I am pretty sure that there are no public pages that link to this page on evernote.com.  An end-user with the link could make one.  As others have noted, only Evernote can give absolute statements on this.

This site explains the robots.txt file (http://www.robotstxt.org).  Note that the file is only advisory (bad agents might ignore).

 

[mackid1993 1,243]

The way PageRank initially worked was pages were ranked higher the more sites that linked to a page. It's more complex than that but that's the basic idea of web search. Nothing is linking to your published notes. Moreover the robots.txt should prevent any reputable search engine from attempting to crawl that path. It's unlikely that such a long hashed string in a URL that has a robots.txt and is linked to by nothing will be crawled by any search engine. Is it impossible, no. Don't publish anything that you don't consider making public.

You can do a search for

sharedate:*

to see all shared notes.

[Vartas 2]

Thanks for all the answers.

@mackid1993 It is unknown if there are any publicly available links to my published and shared notes. The parties I have shared them might have accidentally published or leaked them somewhere to the reach of search engine crawlers. That's why it cannot be stated that nothing is linking to them or it is impossible for search engine indexers to find them.

But the current Robots.txt seems to be set to protect from all legitimate search engines. I checked from shards of few of my published notes. That's good. Thanks @Dave Green
Although there is no knowing what sort of robots.txt Evernote has upkept for the last 12 years (timespan I have shared notes).
Only Evernote knows if all /shard/* links to published notes have been disallowed from search engine indexing since Evernote was established.

I have asked from the Evernote support. I'll post here answer if I get it.

[Vartas 2]

24 days and no reply from Evernote support 😕

Not sure if this is how paid customers should be treated if they are concerned about their note privacy? Total silence form their part. We've been paying customers for 12+ years. Makes me think that maybe we should start looking for alternative such as Notion, Obsidian or Onenote?
I'll give them a month.

[PinkElephant 8,780]

You already got all the answers you need. Which are the obvious answers given the nature of access to notes - how the sharing process works, and that a note not shared can‘t be accessed. 

Just because you say „Oh, I am soooo concerned“ is no reason to draft an elaborate white paper to assure your night sleep.

Don‘t like it, leave.

[Vartas 2]

I disagree.
What is the purpose of support and support forms, if you are not guaranteed an answer or reply (whatever it may be)?

It only creates unnecessary community discussions and speculation if the service provider is not willing to answer questions.
Also unnecessarily undermines trust from any professional or company users.

@PinkElephant "Don't like it, leave it" is a consumer answer. If a company has invested years of resources to a service, and has a lot of data in it, switching service is an unnecessary effort. We'd be happy to continue, but only if we trust data privacy is Ok. It's not about my night sleep, this concerns also employees and customers. I can see from your answer that you did not grasp this.

 

[gazumped 12,057]

2 minutes ago, Vartas said:

What is the purpose of support and support forms, if you are not guaranteed an answer or reply (whatever it may be)?

Support is responsible for helping users deal with signing in / payment / systems issues which bar them from accessing their data,  plus feature requests,  complaints and a host of other demands.  Support teams for all major software providers publish generalised support material and FAQs to try to deal with routine enquiries.  Some subjects won't be covered if they impact the security of the system and answers to "how is my privacy protected" would benefit bad actors as well as concerned users.  You're welcome to ask questions of the support team - they're not obliged to respond quickly or at all...

[Vartas 2]

Thanks @gazumped. I have asked the support team. They are not replying at all. 
It seems they are not inclined to answer because the answer might hint security or data privacy of Evernote is not what it is presumed to be.
An answer of "all published content is secured from all search engines" would not undermine their security.

Another guess is that their support system/processes are not on par, the suppot ticket is in limbo state and will never be processed/answered. That happens too.

Either way, company customers appreciate documented behaviour and prompt support answers from the service provider. Evernote does not seem to serve in either categories. Thus the service does not seem to work well for business usage.

[Jon/t 1,654]

8 minutes ago, Vartas said:

"all published content is secured from all search engines"

This is impossible unless the content is behind a password login.

You can restrict by using a robots.txt file or other methods but if the crawler ignores those methods there is nothing Evernote can do.

If you are unsure then use the Share by email function so that folks need an account to login. 

There's nothing Evernote can do about this. If your URL is public then someone/anyone can get to it if they know/find the URL.

This is also the same for any other service that uses a "anyone who has the link" URL. If someone manages to guess it, they can see it.

[gazumped 12,057]

5 hours ago, Vartas said:

"all published content is secured from all search engines"

At the end of the day I don't think a developer is ever responsible for ensuring that ALL published material is 100% secure - it's definitely down to the account owner to be mindful of the different levels of security available.  Notes and notebooks can be shared directly to email addresses,  via published URL,  or by password-protected blog page.  They can be shared in circumstances where an Evernote account is required to view the content,  or as a public page available to anyone.  Maybe if you can explain to us more about the circumstances in which you wish to share secure information we can offer something more useful.

Bear in mind also that there's a business version of Evernote - https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403442292371-Evernote-Teams-features - which provides individual accounts for employees (and I think selected customers...) plus a central library of shared notebooks for employee onboarding / expense reporting etc etc.  Operating within the authentication protections of that account should provide a much more secure protection for information. 

[PinkElephant 8,780]

To publish something on the web and at the same time asking it to be „secure“ from search engines is a contradiction.

“The web“ since it’s earliest days is living from a working search. If you publish, you want it to be found. And search engines do nothing to a website, so they are secure. You can set a signal on a site not to index it, but it’s not mandatory the bots will follow it.

This said I never had content from any shared note (not only my own) showing up in my searches. Which may be accidental, or not.

[Jon/t 1,654]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

This said I never had content from any shared note (not only my own) showing up in my searches. Which may be accidental, or not.

Most likely because the main search engines respect the robots.txt and other blocking methods.

Ai crawlers probably don't.