TL;DR When you put text behind [spoiler] tags, that does not hide it from search engines.
The reason I’m making a thread for this is because I sometimes see people here putting someone’s name behind a spoiler to stop that person from finding a reference to themselves through a web search or a Google alert. That is not true. The reason this hasn’t been a problem in the past is because the boards were not being indexed by search engines at all.
At the time of posting this, the following boards are indexable by search engines:
- DiS Travel Guide
- Entertainment
- Film & TV
- For Musicians
- How to DiS
- Music
- Site Feedback
- Sports
- The Classifieds
For all of these boards, anything in spoiler tags will be treated as plain text by web crawlers.
I wanted to make a thread making this explicit so people can easily share this information with others in the scenario where they see this false assumption being made.
Here’s an example to prove my point from the brief time where the Social board was scraped by the search engine web spiders:
@futilityofendeavour posted this reply on the Social board:
which contained this snippet of text:
and when I searched the thread for it, the spoiler tags made no difference:
