Bot Questions

[fahl]

Will googlebots etc index an offline forum,
Also will index.html redirect,redirect bots

[ShawneyJ]

google bots as far as i know will index just your title and meta tags to an offline board, they cant index what guests cant see, bots will use i guess your page source to collect title and tags. if you have a index.html redirecting to your forum??? i guess so if they find it.
if your forum was index.php in the first place chances are google will not find a new html page.
but if you have a index.php redirecting to a html page then they should find that and vice versea.

[SEOvB]

If you're redirecting for any reason, make sure you are using 301 or 302 redirects while you need to. 301 is for permanent redirects and 302 are for temporary redirects.

If your forum is offline (if you've used the disable forum option in vBulletin) then the bots won't be able to crawl anything. They'll simply get the Forum closed message over and over again.