I have a private forum that can be seen only by admins and mods to deal with board issues. Is it possible for Google or any other search engine to search and cache the private forum for the public to see? One of my admins noticed it in a Google search, and I can't replicate his results. We have private info in the forum that needs to remain private.

Is there any documentation of this happening before? Or could my admin have tricked or fooled himself somehow?

I'd really hate to have to put a "no search" tag on the website. We are just starting to see some increased traffic from search results.

To the best of my knowledge Google cannot read a forum unless it's public. Also, I noticed that you don't have a spider hack so it's pretty unlikely that posts withing your forums have been picked up either. Click Here for a listing of all your sites in Google. You can do this yourself any time by typing this into Google:
site:www.haroldandrews.com haroldandrews.com

No - if they follow a direct URL to the private forum, they would be intercepted by the "we cannot proceede" message, if they don't have permission to see.

Logout from your website... that's exactly what the search engines can see.

Thanks for the replies. I was really worried for a bit. Jim must have gotten himself confused somehow.

Hehe I ran that search on my URL and the second and third listing was my profile.

Too funny!