How did visitors find unlisted galleries?

ChancyRat

How is this even possible in the realm of physics? Is there a field in GA I can check for more info than I have already found? Is there something on my site I should check?

In GA yesterday, 2 visitors in two different U.S. states, New York and Ohio, one using Windows, the other an Android tablet, with both on the same network, rr.com, landed on two different unlisted galleries that are in an unlisted folder (the same folder). GA indicates they were "direct referrals".

There were no keywords associated with these visitors. The unlisted galleries were the starting page. One visitor visited one other page. For that one, the starting unlisted gallery was an old HTML sitemap from legacy, so likely this person clicked to the 2nd page from that sitemap. The 2nd visitor didn't go anywhere else. There was no referral link for these in GA.

The find settings in both galleries and folders are off. No find in SM, no find in google.
All share settings are off.

I have not touched or modified these galleries for some time.

I logged out and checked for links on/in:
keywords
browse page
search page
my visitor sitemap (thanks again Lamah!!! - http://www.joinrats.com/Sitemap/n-jKKP4)
my topnavbars (2, one on the home page, one on entire site)
my homepage visitor site map (main body content of that page)

It would not be possible to just guess at the URL.

Should I do something to 'bomb-proof' my unlisted material? What could have happened? Thanks for thinking about this issue, I wonder if others have similar experiences.

ChancyRat

I wonder if Smugmug-ers were the visitors? Fairfield, Ohio, and Albany, New York?

ChancyRat

I expanded the time period to include today, and someone in North Carolina has visited another unlisted gallery in that same folder. That network is embarqhsd.net, not rr.com.

ChancyRat

Wait - what these galleries all have in common is that they *were* part of Legacy, public in Legacy world.
So the code/tag numbers could still be floating out in the world, and be valid for visitors, even though the path and gallery settings are now unlisted.

Sorry to take this winding road but at least I learned an important lesson, if you really are going to relocate galleries to unlisted, take them out of commission, you should consider doing it by setting up a new gallery for each, so that the old tag codes 'go away.'

guy

ChancyRat wrote: »

Wait - what these galleries all have in common is that they *were* part of Legacy, public in Legacy world.
So the code/tag numbers could still be floating out in the world, and be valid for visitors, even though the path and gallery settings are now unlisted.

Sorry to take this winding road but at least I learned an important lesson, if you really are going to relocate galleries to unlisted, take them out of commission, you should consider doing it by setting up a new gallery for each, so that the old tag codes 'go away.'

Always good to remember that there is no security or expectation that photos in hidden galleries can not be found. I view it as a design option rather than a security option. If you don't want people to see photos then the galleries need to be private or password protected.

Another possible way people may have found them, do you have any photos from these hidden galleries embedded elsewhere (blogs etc) if so the path to the gallery is out there & all the user would have to do to find it would be cut off the last bit of the photo url.

ChancyRat

guy wrote: »

Always good to remember that there is no security or expectation that photos in hidden galleries can not be found. I view it as a design option rather than a security option. If you don't want people to see photos then the galleries need to be private or password protected.

Another possible way people may have found them, do you have any photos from these hidden galleries embedded elsewhere (blogs etc) if so the path to the gallery is out there & all the user would have to do to find it would be cut off the last bit of the photo url.

Thanks, Guy. No, nothing in these that would have been embedded elsewhere. One was the old visitor sitemap HTML page, another was a smart gallery of All Videos on the site, that has been replaced with a new method. The third was more of a standard gallery but no embeddable photos. It strikes me that they all must have been clicked from very old links out in the webnetherlands.

beardedgit

Just a long shot, but could they have been accessed via links that you've provided on this forum while getting help during your site dev? If someone has bookmarked those links and accessed them directly from a browser, wouldn't they show in GA as "direct referrals"?

ChancyRat

Oh good point! Two of the galleries might fit into that, the third, no. Very interesting how the web can haunt us to our dying days.

beardedgit

ChancyRat wrote: »

Very interesting how the web can haunt us to our dying days.

Indeed. Google will have you by the short 'n curlies if they've crawled and indexed those URLs

Even after Google "forgets", if it ever does, there's still Wayback Machine out there archiving websites.

thenickdude

You can check which Unlisted gallery URLs have ended up in Google's index with a search like this:

https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Awww.joinrats.com+inurl%3An-

You can request individual pages to be removed from Google's index with their Webmaster Tools options.

ChancyRat

:jawdrop

Lamah wrote: »

You can check which Unlisted gallery URLs have ended up in Google's index with a search like this:

https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Awww.joinrats.com+inurl%3An-

You can request individual pages to be removed from Google's index with their Webmaster Tools options.

ChancyRat

[QUOTE=beardedgit;1936351..., there's still Wayback Machine out there archiving websites.[/QUOTE]

:wow :jawdrop :wow