Google plans to index all published documents from Google Docs users if the documents are linked from a public (that means crawled by Google Bot) website. What this means is that Google Docs users might find their documents in the Google index even if they never had the intention for this.

The main problem with the procedure is the following: Google Docs users cannot explicitly block their documents from being indexed. Even worse is the fact that there is not an option to see if their documents have been publicly linked.

Only documents that have been explicitly published by selecting the ‘Publish as web page’ or ‘Publish/embed’ option and are linked from a public accessible website will be indexed by Google Search. The only option at this point in time is to undo this from the same menu.

A click on the Stop Publishing button will prevent that the document will be indexed in Google Search. It will also mean on the other hand that the document will no longer be accessible if it has been linked from a website.