On Scribd, you can either publish a document as public or private. Public documents can be seen by all of our subscribers, and many are also available to other readers visiting Scribd.
Private documents differ in these important ways:
- Private documents are not indexed by search engines and will not show up in search results—either on Scribd or elsewhere.
- Private documents will not appear on your public Scribd profile.
- Private documents have a unique string appended to their URL; without it, the document's URL will not work.
- If you send a private document's Scribd link to someone else and they view it, they cannot get the code to embed it somewhere else.
- If you embed a private document on another website, it will not be downloadable from the embed, regardless of the document's download settings.
If you want to upload a document to Scribd and keep it so that only a select few see it, make sure you mark it as private. It won't be seen on your profile or found by searching, browsing, or anything else. It can only be viewed by those that you give the full URL (unique string included). Without that URL, the only means to see it would be logged into the account that uploaded the document.
If you have any additional questions, let our support team know and we'll be happy to help!