Another question about closing my forum to guests

[BravoSix]

I'm wondering if closing my community to guests/lurkers, may adversely affect my placement or indexing with search engines? I'm thinking that because topics/subjects can't be indexed.

-Todd

[SarkZKalie]

I think Yes

[BravoSix]

Hmmmm..... that could be problematic for me.

[jucarese]

Search engines enter as guests to the forums, if you close everything for the guests the crawlers will not be able to index the forum.
But you can leave them open only to read but not to write or answer if they don't register, if you don't want them to copy anything there are also Javacripts to avoid it.

[BravoSix]

Wouldn't the info that they copy be something necessary to index?

-Todd

[jucarese]

the only way to prohibit the bot from tracking you is through the robot.txt file, if it had such an entry:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
you can see your robots.txt file adding that to the end of your forum https: // url of your forum / robots.txt and see if you have that entry in the file, if not the bot crawls without problems.

What the bot does is capture the urls of your forum.

[BravoSix]

Thanks guys. Much appreciated.

-Todd

[skouliki]

The topic was posted in the wrong section, so I have moved it to the correct section. Please read our forum rules:  ESF General Rules

Problem solved & topic archived. Please read our forum rules:  ESF General Rules