google bots
 

ok not sure as to post this as basically its just a general question.

how do you get google bots or any other bots to check your forums.
Also how can forbid the bots to not check certain forums such as mod rooms etc as obviously you dont want these checked.
Is this all done by registering your board with one of them pay sites things ?

Googlebot is not like a user, it'll only spider content available to guests :)

right so if some sections are offlimit to guests then google wont scan them.

cheers dean.

That's correct :)

This is why I am tryin find a way to change googles usergroup :)

Bad idea. Many browsers let you change their user agents, which means somebody could pretend to be Google. If you're checking by IP, there are ways around that, too.

Also Google maintains a cache of everything it crawls unless you specify otherwise, so your content would still be visible to everybody.

edit: also, you risk deletion from Google if you alter your page significantly when Googlebot is encountered as by their TOS.

can u go in depth a bit more m8 as this is all new to me.
i want google to just index sections that i would leave open to guests>anything that is restricted from guests i dont want google to scan but u threw me a bit when u said google caches everything and the info would still be visable to everyone.

Also what do you mean by altering your page when googlebot is encountered ?

What filburt meant by "you risk deletion from Google if you alter your page significantly when Googlebot is encountered as by their TOS" is that if you deliver content specifically to google's bot then you are breaking their Terms of Service. For example the IP addresses of google's bots are publically available. This means with PHP you can effectively deliver one page to them, and one to everyone else. See what I mean :)?

yep cleared it up cheers again