Posts showing up on Google
 

Is there a way to make sure that my member's posts do NOT show up on google?

I have my entire board as private, but a few of the posts are showing up when searching for the persons' name (I require peopel to use first/last names as usernames). My board members are professionals that need their names to come up for their websites, not a message board.

I thought that I had had it fixed, but a member just made me aware of the fact that her name comes up for her intro post (the only forum not private).

Is there any way I can make that one open forum not searchable by google? I don't care if it makes my SEO go down for the board, I'm not worried about that.

Thanks so much!

Did you try robots.txt?

The best way to block all SE-spiders is to simply set the permissions on your forums to not allow guests to view the post text.

Do you maybe have the archive on? Turn it off.
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I've never had any problems doing what Marco suggests.

The Archive also follows the usergroup permissions. ;)

Does it follow them retroactively?

i.e. if I have a public forum and make it private after two weeks will those previous two weeks posts disappear from the archive?

I presume so but I had a bit of a panic in my early days on vb.

From the archive: Yes

But if a search engine has already spidered the content, then it will still live in the SE's Cache until the page is spidered again and the new (read: no permission) content is encountered.

So if the page is already indexed by SE, changing the permissions will not by magic remove it from the SE.

:o

We'll have to wait for vb4 for magic:confused:

j/k

cheers

Thanks very much Marco.. I switched my permissions.. so there's no way to make those old cached pages disappear? No google eraser? ;)

There is
Once the same thing happened with me.
You can email google support and they will remove it for you
Better if you mail from your site domain
Thanks

Actually.. I just found that you can submit specific links to be removed from Google's cache if you contact them directly.. So that may help. I've got it blocked from doing any more spidering though.. thanks :

--------------- Added [DATE]1203713389[/DATE] at [TIME]1203713389[/TIME] ---------------

Thats what I did.. thanks Superprogrammer :)