I'm not sure which way to go here. Should i hide my forums content from guests or make it all viewable? It seems a lot more people register when everything is hidden, but maybe i'm wrong. Also, does hiding the content from guests make it harder for bots to index the sites content?
Hiding content from guests
- Thread starter Heartless
- Start date
In my humble opinion, if you want to hide your content, then your content must be of high value and unique. There must be a reason why guests should register at your forums just to see your content, otherwise they can just google what they want and I'm 100% sure that they'll find it in another site.
I say that you should start your forum with visible-to-all content, and then after a while start hiding parts of the forum, but not all. Maybe you can make a VIP section or something to encourage users to join and gain access to it. 🙂
About the bots, it depends. Usually you can choose which usergroup the bots belong to. I'd say you should set their default usergroup as members, so that they could index everything, including the hidden content.
Good luck!
I say that you should start your forum with visible-to-all content, and then after a while start hiding parts of the forum, but not all. Maybe you can make a VIP section or something to encourage users to join and gain access to it. 🙂
About the bots, it depends. Usually you can choose which usergroup the bots belong to. I'd say you should set their default usergroup as members, so that they could index everything, including the hidden content.
Good luck!
Unless you set it in a certain way, the bots won't be able to index all of your content which won't be helpful to you at all.
I suggest you let most if not all content be viewed by guests so they know what they're signing up to
I suggest you let most if not all content be viewed by guests so they know what they're signing up to
Joshua Farrell
FP's Housekeeper
In phpbb, all bots are set in the spiders group I think, and if you want your content not viewable by guests, but still be able to be indexed by bots, you could set the two groups to have different permissions. Guests set to not view the content, and bots set to view the content.
Creativebot
Paragon
Heartless said:
If you want your forum to be successful and get a lot of traffic then I suggest keeping all forums viewable, except for staff forums(if any). You have a better chance for getting more traffic because if you make your forums private and guests cannot view them, then neither can SEO Bots like Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc. Which will decrease your chances of getting more traffic.
I have this problem: my forum is for writers, and my members want the writing section hidden from guests, for copyright reasons. This creates a problem for me, because I have to respect their wishes, as my members, as well as attracting other people to my forum. I've had writers tell me that if that block was not imposed, they would not post their stories, but other people have told me that they want to see what the main section is like before joining. It's quite a conundrum.
So ''post your stories here if you want them to get ripped off by the wider world?'' No one would post anything in such a section, and it would make the forum look dead as a doornail. The rest of our forums are free to view, though, except the advertising forum.
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