Today a team member did a random public search on Bing using some keywords from an ongoing project. The first result was a link to a file on our internal MS Teams site. Is this supposed to happen? How can we prevent this?

Um, that sounds bad. I'm not able to reproduce it though, at least not with Team site/documents. My SPO admin site is visible in multiple articles, but that's my own fault :)

Thx David Rosenthal for looping us on this. Started internal investigation right away to avoid confusion.

Thanks for looping us in. If a search crawler discovers a link to an authenticated SharePoint Online site, it may add the link to the index. Because the site requires authentication, the site title and contents will not be indexed – only the presence of the URL. This should only occur when there is a link to the site collection somewhere on the public internet (e.g. someone might have use anonymous link sharing and posted that link somewhere where a internet search crawler could find it). The timing of this particular thread is an interesting coincidence, as we are doing work in this area. Just this month, to mitigate this, we have added a default robots.txt file to every site collection which instructs search crawlers not to index this URL. This will prevent search crawlers from adding new sites to their index. Existing sites should be removed from the search results next time the site is indexed by the search crawler. You can actually see the robots.txt file for your domain at https://<tenantURL>/robots.txt The change is rolling out - should be mostly complete but might be a few deployments that do not yet have it. Hope this helps!

Ey Adam: May I ask you why this change/issue has not been informed in the Message Center?

Great to hear of the work to better protect even the URLs. There seem to be other ways these are getting surfaced though, as my tenant does not and has never had anonymous sharing turned on. I can't rule it out, but I would also be very surprised to find that someone from my team had put one of these URLs out on the public internet. Is this affected by Guest Access in Office 365 Groups or anything like that? Does that URL have to become visible to the world somehow in order for guests to get to it?

Teams site showing up in public Bing results

Nikhil Nulkar
Brass Contributor
Apr 24, 2017
Just confirming. I was able to recreate the same for my team's site by searching it on Bing. However, Google didnt throw it up for same keyword search. This is alarming. I am glad Microsoft is already working on fixing this but it worries me that such an issue existed in the first place and that a user had to chance bump into it, for us to find out. Hope to see this fixed soon. Thanks!
Dale Wilson
Copper Contributor
Apr 21, 2017
It doesn't show up in Google, but it does show up in Yahoo and DuckDuckGo which if I am correct, use the Bing engine. See screenshot below. I have blocked out the search terms as this is an ongoing project.
- David Rosenthal
  Microsoft
  Apr 21, 2017
  I have a site level repro of this. Not down to documents or folders, but the site itself. This is a modern team site spun up as the result of creation in Microsoft Teams, which fired the corresponding Office 365 Group and everything that comes with that.
  
  Something seems to be visible to the search engines around URLs at least. VesaJuvonen, AdamHarmetz this is probably something you guys would want to know about.
  - VesaJuvonen
    Microsoft
    Apr 21, 2017
    Thx David Rosenthal for looping us on this. Started internal investigation right away to avoid confusion.
Pieter Veenstra
MVP
Apr 21, 2017
I've just seen the same issue. this doesn't look right.
Salvatore Biscari
Silver Contributor
Apr 21, 2017
Was the file shared with an anonymous link and was it referenced within a public page somewhere?
- Dale Wilson
  Copper Contributor
  Apr 21, 2017
  No it hasn't.
Loryan Strant
MVP
Apr 21, 2017
That shouldn't happen at all, as those files would be stored in an Office 365 Group which is not indexable by search engines.
Are you sure they weren't searching across SharePoint as opposed to Bing? Did they actually go to Bing.com or did they just type the search into their address bar?
If you can supply a screenshot that would be helpful.
- Dale Wilson
  Copper Contributor
  Apr 21, 2017
  No, it was Bing. We also saw the same result using Yahoo and DuckDuckGo but not with Google
- jcgonzalezmartin
  MVP
  Apr 21, 2017
  Wow, I have just tried to search by one of the tenant names I manage using Google and I got returned the Url of the SPO Admin....^-^ cc VasilMichev TonyRedmond FYI
  - TonyRedmond
    MVP
    Apr 21, 2017
    I don't see any problems for my tenant but I would like to see the steps required to reproduce the issue to check against them...
    
    TR

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Teams site showing up in public Bing results

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