But there is nothing to indicate either in the post or in the referenced SO thread that the URLs are published to the search results. They are visited by bingbot, that much seems confirmed, but there’s no example where one of these results shows up in the public search results.
I've put in a hard block for all crawlers on all pages. Works for my scenario I think. Hopefully they don't lie in their user agent. Then it's going to be really bad.
Yes, but there is no indication they are publishing it in the search results.
The original post is just complaining that the malware scanning is visiting the links.
They come to the following conclusion
>This effectively makes all one-time use links like login/pass-reset/etc useless.
Which we all know is not true because sites like onetimesecret.com allow for entering a separate password to prevent this sort of thing when it does happen.
It would be an interesting discussion to talk about what Microsoft's whitelisting process looks like, but the original article doesn't seem to understand what is going on well enough to drive the conversation in that direction.
All pages with one click links should have no index follow or no index no follow. Your seo consultant (if you have one) should have advised you on this.
I am not saying this excuses the privacy violation but just suggesting there are things we can do...
Worse would be links that are private to the people who posses the url. Like a private video on YouTube or a private document in google docs. The security depends on the URL being secret. This would silently publish secret information.
If those pages have no proper meta tags or robots.txt, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Security by obscurity was never a good approach; from Proxies to security scanners, there has always been software that crawls unassuming URLs and published the results somewhere, if only a report to the admin.
If you can say for certain that the links being published are coming from the malware scanning, and not being taken from users' browser sessions that are using Microsoft Edge you should elaborate on this.
I would be pretty mortified if browsers were using user browser sessions to scan content and pass it to bingbot…? What about if you’re browsing something local? Or your bank account?
