Do the search engines index pages conaining GET request (php)

Question

I have some pages on the website, which are hidden by GET request: For example, if you navigate the page http://www.mypage.com/example.php you see one content but if you navigate http://www.mypage.com/example.php?name=12345 you get other content Do the search engines see such pages? If yes, is it possible to hide them from search engines, like google

Thanx in advance

I am sure, there are no links for such page anywhere on internet, as I take it as a "secret" page. But even with that, they can crawl it?

Answer 1

I could be wrongt. But when you dont have any hyperlink wich refers to "?name=12345" they shouldnt find the page. But if there is a hyperlink at any page of the world it may be possible.

Answer 2

There is a saying that security through obscurity is no security at all. If you have a page that you want to actually be secret or secure, you need to do something other than making sure it isn't indexed.

Search engines typically find pages by looking at links. If there isn't a link to the page, then it probably won't index it (unless it finds the page in some other way -- eg, like Bing did: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/ct2jwf/bing-gets-served ). Note that whether you have a GET parameter ( /index.php?param=12345 ) or not ( /index.php ) won't affect this. Search engine crawlers can find either of them just as easily.

If your concern is to stop search engines from indexing your site, you should use a robots.txt file. Check out http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html for some info on robots.txt files (the examples below come from that page). If you want to prevent search engines from indexing any page on your site, you can do something like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If you want to disallow specific directories, you can do something like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /junk/

If you want to disallow specific URLs, you can do something like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /~joe/junk.html
Disallow: /~joe/foo.html
Disallow: /~joe/bar.html