Webmasters beware. You had better be careful about how you arrange and store secure information on the internet.

The Social Security numbers and test scores of 619 students at public schools in Catawba County, N.C., were available on Google until last Friday, when the company complied with a local court order to delete all information about that county's board of education from its servers.

Nobody is quite sure how the supposedly "secure" pages got onto Google's index, but one thing is for sure, Google's robots could not have "hacked" into the school site or generated the necessary passwords on their own. So how did it happen? There are several likely scenarios: Someone might have made the student information available to the search engine by making the content public by either removing the security settings on the pages or by posting a hyperlinked URL with an embedded password.

The students' personal information was discovered last week when a relative of one of the students performed a Google search. I have a feeling that the real culprit behind this security leak will eventually be exposed (probably some disgruntled student or employee...or just an unqualified webmaster).

The moral of the story? Make sure your secure internet data is well-maintained. Otherwise, the Google bots can and will get their hands on it.

Get more insight on Google bots at SEOproject.com