How come my email shows up at Google?

[Drea]

How is it that I find some of my forum posts that show up on Google??I don't like this "sharing" type of function. What gives?How do I keep that from happening?

[capekate]

Hi Drea,
I was as surprised as you when I once did a google on CapeKate and found that it is just not this forum that it happens in. I dont know if there is something that can be done about it. One of the problems of being out there on the 'net' i guess. But as far as my actual email address showing up, Im not sure that I noticed that. I may have to check it out again.

[Drea]

Point taken about the net. I only use one other forum, and have never had my posts or my email address show up on Google. Yeah, email address is in my FL posts, at least the two I found.... and it is in bold print on Google....
Grrrrrrr! not too happy So why not just make this possibility known to any FL members?

[Mike]

The forum pages are just like any other web page in that google, yahoo, msn can all view them and index these pages into their search engines. The search engines do not have access to your profile to get your email address. They will only be able to get your email address if you've specifically typed it into a post.

The reason why it's bold in the search results is because it's a term you've searched on most likely.

[Mike]

It's in our interest to have the search engines index these pages so that we can get more visitors to our forum. Without the search engines nobody would be here.

[Drea]

So could that info you stated be given somewhere at the Forum, so that anyone who's not computer savvy (like me) would've known by sharing my email in a post, it will show up in a search engine?

[Mike]

You bet - just added an announcement here: Personal Info in posts

[Drea]

Thanks, Mike.....I did find the way (an old gal can learn new tricks ) to delete one of my posts and it disappeared from Google right away. The other was deleted from FL also, yet didn't remove from Google. Do you think it could be because it was in a poll, and my "vote" couldn't be removed, or that other thing you said about how Google works...

[Mike]

If you removed your email from the post it should eventually drop out of the google index once they re-index that page. It can take a couple days to up to a couple of months to drop out of the google index.