Hi,
That depends. If it’s the “index” file of your site root, such as index.html, index.php, index.asp, etc., then yes. (and of course, this assumes that you’ve actually submitted your site to Google, or somebody already in Google links to you) Google (and your browser) are looking for this as the start of your site. And I’m assuming by “public domain” you might have been referring to the public_html folder or equivalent, which is your site root.
If you have WordPress installed, and you’ve added a link to WordPress to the non-Wordpress HTML file, then yes.
But let’s say you just stuck a file like dreck.html into your site root, and nothing else links to it. Google won’t care about that. There are some non-linked files that Google looks for, such as XML sitemaps, and a handful of others that are more server-related, but no, it won’t just find a random page. Their programmers would code to avoid pulling in any old file; this means that Google will get meaningful data.
There could be one exception to this: if you submit your site to Google as “adamcm.com/dreck.html”, instead of “adamcm.com” then Google may list it.
Cheers, Dave
Thread Starter
adamcm
(@adamcm)
Thanks that is what I was looking for. Now if I added a link to a different HTML file on a particular WordPress post, would Google read all of the contents within the file that is being linked?
Google will read all links that is made available to it through the sitemap. So if any pages outside your wordpress you want google to read, make sure it is available in the sitemap.xml that you have submitted to google webmasters.
also make sure that your site’s robots.txt file does not prevent the bots to access the link you want google to read.
