Treat search engine bots as users?

[SilentK]

Is there a plugin or hack that allows an admin to set the forums to treat search engine bots as members of a particular user group?

[treasureman]

I would like to know this also.

I need to assign the search engines to their own user group so I can give them permission to view (spider) my forums as I do not allow "guests" to view the postings.

Any ideas?

[Andreas]

No way.
Even if you did it, you might break search engines ToS as this could/woukld be considered cloaking.

Make your content readable by guests. If it is worth it, they will sign up.
If it is not, and you have to force them to sign up, then they won't post anyway - and you gain nothing.

[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!

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by treasureman

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.

Really, it can't be done.

You could check IP (ranges) - could be spoofed.
You could check Useragents - can be easily set in browsers like Opera or Firefox.

Furthermore, content that is readable by registered users only is not the same as being readable by guests.
So you are cloaking if you are trying to get stuff indexed that isn't viewable by the general public.

BMW just got tossed out of Google, your site could be the next.