If you have installed Google Toolbar, and you have certain features enabled (e.g. PageRank view or the new Sidewiki) the Google Toolbar sends information back to Google.
This means that pages that you visit may be found by Google (and passed to Googlebot for crawling).
So why does this matter?
Well, the curses from Pete this morning about a client’s development site being indexed are a good indication why.
This is a far from uncommon incidence as this thread on Webmaster World indicates and can expose things you would rather not have in the public domain, and create duplicate versions of websites. Hence the fact that we regularly check for things like this when taking on a new client.
If you don’t explicitly disallow content from Google these days, they WILL find it and they WILL index it.
We’ve taked about this before in terms of forms and drop downs but not that they use Google Toolbar as a page discovery method.
To exclude content from Google see my blog from nearly two years ago 3 ways to keep content out of search engines which is still as relevant today as it was then, although you have a couple of extra options these days such as the canonical meta tag.
As an SEO company, it is amazing the breadth of different things that we look at for a site that we are optimising, not just limited to title tags and backlinks!
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