We all know how powerful Google search engine is in handling searches, page crawling and indexing. So if your web directories are not properly controlled, the bot might just came in, and crawl everything out, including your private messenger chat, leaving them naked on the WWW.

ICQ Chat Logs

I’m not sure if any of us are still using ICQ, but if you are using the online version of ICQ (instead of the ICQ app), you should know that your chat logs will be stored online. Best part of all, it’s searchable. Dangerous?

How to - Search for intitle:”Index of /” ICQ in Google search box.

Other Chat Logs

This one targets something more general, basically if they are chat logs and matches the search keywords, it’ll be exposed too. If you are performing a search with the following keyword, you are so going to find something interesting.

How to - Search for “Index of” / “chat/logs”

in Google search box.

Fast Solution

The quickest way to make sure private files are not crawled by Google bots is to have this following code in your robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

or include a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”> inside your HTML, before </head>.