You don't need to ban access to misc (it has a FAQ, if that could ever help your ranking) and especially printthread which will redundantly include thread contents and will get you a lot more hits on Google :)

Has anything changed for version 2.3.0? For example, should we alter the robots.txt contents?

No changes.

do you need to do anything else to appear on search engines or does it just happen if someone types a keyword you have on your site?

The latter, usually. You, of course, usually need to initially submit your site ONLY ONCE! to Google. Submit it multiple times and they'll block you.

ty, submitted :) hate the fact they cant be sure if it will even go on :(

Thanks for the URL that way I can submit my site :) i'll keep that in mind too to save space

Ok, I feel like a total idiot.

I don't have meta tags anywhere in my FORUMHOME template. Where is the best place to insert this data?

You dont' need to edit any templates. You can alter keywords and description from the Admin control panel > VBoptions > General settings. Altering the keywords and description here will replace it in the headinclude template. Which means they meta data will appear an most pages.