Closed to non-registered but open to search......
 

Is it possible to have a closed board to non-registered users, but then have the board open to search engines/bots?

I did a search, but didn't find anything that really fit.

Anyone?

Chris

This cant be possible considering the fact that search engine spider is not a member either.

One way to make it possible is to use a trick though: You can create a PHP script which gets threads from your board and give the address of this script to spider and hide it from other users.

2 Important question at that point:

1- What's the point of opening your threads to SE spiders when they cant address vb threads (if you dont use a special hack). SE dont register vb pages since they are dynamic.

2- What's the point of registering your "private" threads to search engines when you dont want them accessed by non members? If you register them, everybody will be able to visit them via search engine link..

I hate to disagree with you, but my forum is HEAVILY indexed on google and a few others. I get a lot of traffic from search engines directly to my forums.


I want the threads to be listed, but I don't want non-members reading them. I guess my logic is that I will get more subscribers this way.

Chris

Really? Do you use a special hack (like the one that converts threads to static HTML messages)? If not I would really like to know the secret if any.

My board has been visited by many search engine spiders (I can see them via who is online) but never get indexed by any search engines especially by google. My knowledge was that google and many search engines does not register dynamic pages and there are a lot of hints and tricks in the internet to pass their restrictions some of which does not work. There are also hacks here in vb.org for spider-friendly boards. I will be surprised if your site is indexed without any hacks..

Nope. no special hack for that. Atleast, not one that I can remember installing. :) I don't use sessions and have some sections open to all, maybe that is why.

To be honest, I really don't know.

Chris