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