We have seen many companies over the years use their Internet server as an internal file-sharing network of sorts. Most of them wrongly assumed that the file could not be found since it wasn’t a “web page”. However, Google indexed a multitude of files and using the filetype: command makes it quite easy for your competitors to find them. Let us show you an example:

internet marketing budget filetype:xls site:gov

Typing that into Google will bring up almost 300 pages. These will all be Microsoft Excel files that include the word/s marketing budget within the spiderable text and/or title.

The first result happens to be just what we were looking for: The Whitehouse marketing budget. No, we’re not picking on George Bush. That’s my other blog . We wanted to show you what not to do without using another company as an example, and the Whitehouse is not likely to litigate on this entry.

You can view the cached version or click on the link to download the Excel file.