[treasureman]

Thank you for your reply.

I am a new VB user, just converted from Invision board that I had used for 2 years. I have a medium size forum (22,000 users, 370,000 posts) for professionals in the real estate industry.

With Invision board there is a setting where you can allow Search engines to read the forums, even if the forums are closed to being read by guests. In other words you could assign the search engines to have the same permissions as Registered Users if you wanted.

I used that setting for 2 years and so do thousands of other Invision users, and never had a problem. My content got spidered and was in the search engines.

I actually did a test to see if this setting would be effective. When I closed my board to guest reading it almost doubled my registrations because people wanted to read the content. A certain percentage of those will also become posters, and customers of my other related services . So it does work to increase registrations which was my goal. The more registered users I have the more business I do.

Now....PLEASE do not take this the wrong way! I absolutely love VBulletin and it's features! It is far and away the Rollls Royce of the forums. Lots better than Invision! No way I would go back to Invision. All the features in the Admin CP of VBulletin has just blown me away, and I am well pleased even if I can not solve the search engine reading thing.

But it would be nice! and I know it can be done somehow, and it didn't cause any cloaking or other problems because the content read by the search engines was the same as the registered users.

Thanks again, and kudos for a wonderful product!