Google Docs, the free suite of online office tools will start being crawled and indexed soon.  According to a post made by a Google employee on the Google Docs help forum, “This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

Google Docs, which is being used by millions as a free alternative to the pricey Microsoft Office suite, currently offers programs for creating and editing word processing documents, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations and forms.

How To Keep Your Docs Private

It is important to note, due to Google Docs being crawled, if you create a document that you do not want to potentially show up in search results, make sure you choose the “stop publishing” option under the “publish / embed” settings under the “share” tab…. especially if you are one that keeps a spreadsheet of  usernames and logins for websites and software programs.

It will be interesting to see whether or not organizations will be able to benefit in terms of SEO from this change.  PDF documents have been crawled and indexed for years, and in my experience tend to rank even higher than standard html or php pages for certain types of keyword phrases…. looks like it’s time to run some tests!