Indexing by Google

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Hello!
Must I do somyhing special to make the texts in the messages available to indexing (searching) by Google, Yahoo etc.?
Thank you
[originally posted on jforum.net by yanam]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

There is no need for special configurations. Just give google's bots enough time to index your board. Of course taht all SEO aspect apply.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

yanam wrote:Hello!
Must I do somyhing special to make the texts in the messages available to indexing (searching) by Google, Yahoo etc.?
Thank you

We are having the exact opposite problem. One of our users was quite upset that upon Googling their name, the second result was a direct link to their profile page on our forum, even though it is password-protected. ops: It appears the Google robot is able to penetrate these pages without having a login. I was also able to retrieve the entire page with WGET without a login and password. We are using single-sign-on.

Why is this and what can we fix on the backend to stop this from happening?
Google allows you to exclude pages with the use of robots.txt but that is really a band-aid. How can we stop any "dumb client" from accessing these pages?

[originally posted on jforum.net by Skoach]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Which URL? user/edit or user/profile?

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

I can imagine it was /user/profile - as the link is avaiable in the 'header' section. I doubt that bots use brute force techniques to find out about links but rather jump from avaiable link to link.

To avoid it you can edit the header.htm file and make an <#if logged> clause around the member listing entry in the forum header.

Maybe this helps.
[originally posted on jforum.net by Sid]