Well, they will not commit to any further elaboration so I say act on the side of caution and beware.

I have settled on a compromise: I will allow all guests (including spiders) to view the forums and thread titles but stop short of showing thread content. Hopefully most thread titles will be informative (and not of the "Help!", "One more thing" and "Well what do you know..." variety) and so entice Google search engine users to come and register.

You can achieve this with the built-in permissions options by setting the forum permissions for each forum for the Unregistered/Not Logged In usergroup as follows:
Can View Forum Yes
Can View Thread Content No
Can View Others' Threads Yes

vB can't tell who the guest is (whether or not they have posted in the forum before) and so all threads are by someone else. But they are still not allowed to view the content.

The quickest way to implement this for all your forums is to do it once manually for one forum and then use the Forum-Based Permission Duplicator . You can find a link to that duplicator at the top of the page:
Admin Control Panel -> Forums and Moderators -> Forum Permissions

I hope this helps. :)

Do you have Googlebot defined as such in your AdminCP - Spider Identification?

ie: Does googlebot show up in your Who's Online ever?

seems a good hack , thanks

donno if its working for me..??

but i see that it has no permissions :S

now guests have permission to view profiles n stuff :s.... so do memebers...?

Just wondering, has anyone actually seen their rank improved as a result of this hack?

I have something like 11 members and 2 guests show up quite a bit. When I enter the whos online page, it will say one of the guests - I can tell its googlebot by the browser id only.

googlebot is listed in the spider id xml file if thats what you mean?

Dear trilljester & everybody,

I didn't try this mod yet but after reviewing all of your discussions here, I have some ideas :

1. This mod is alright with Google, you guys don't need to worry. Because, very simple, you can set for Guests permission to view all of pages on your forums. In this mod, you set for Spiders permission to view all of pages, there is no problem from Google or whether.

2. I recommend that you guys should create a separate usergroup for Bots, with viewing permissions only. This is good in case if someone try to be .. a bot. In this moment, I am willing to be a spider to make some posts annoy your forums because Bots are in Registered usergroup.

Just small ideas.

Additional, a short question : Is there any accident if we use this mod and vbBOL ?

boeserwolf klicks install

It´s very useful for my community as a lot of members would complain if we would allow guests to read the threads. We have a legal topic in our board, but we also want to improve our search engine ranking, so I think this is one of the best hacks to fullfil both needs.

Thanks a lot for this

Markus

You don't appear to understand.

By allowing SE bots to read these 'member-only' threads, you ARE allowing Guests to read them.

a) by viewing the cached page in the SE results.
b) by changing their Useragent to match that of a known bot, thereby allowing an actual Guest to read the thread.