Hide Forum from SERPs

[WeGotThat]

We have a forum set up on one of our sites for members to use to discuss their business practices, meetups, etc. The forum is already members only, but we've noticed some posts will show up in search engine results pages. What's the best way to prevent these pages from coming up in the SERPs?

[GregChapman]

WeGotThat wrote

We have a forum set up on one of our sites for members to use to discuss their business practices, meetups, etc. The forum is already members only, but we've noticed some posts will show up in search engine results pages. What's the best way to prevent these pages from coming up in the SERPs?

Change the permissions (Options > Users > Change Permissions) so that those in the "Anyone" group do NOT have the "View" permission and add the "View" permission to those in the "Registered" group.

If you have implemented a manual membership system, then give the "View" permission to "Members" rather than "Registered".

All users (including search engines) are then presented with a Login Screen which a search engine cannot get through as they will not have registered or not be in the "Members" group.

[WeGotThat]

That sounds like an easy enough solution, I’m not sure it will work in my case though. The forum isn’t embedded on the site, but rather linked to from a members’ area section. If I’m understanding your suggestion correctly, adding the View to Registered users will force them to have to log in a second time to see the forum (once to get to the members’ section of the site and another to get into the forum). 

I don’t have the time or resources to write an SSO solution between the site and the forum for this. Would it be possible to add a noindex tag to the forum pages? I realize I’d still be at the mercy of the individual search engines to obey the noindex meta, but wouldn’t that at least get me in the right direction?

All my best,

-c

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Chris Hood, Web Solutions Guru

www.wegotthat.com

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On Apr 2, 2015, at 5:05 AM, GregChapman [via Nabble Support] <[hidden email]> wrote:

WeGotThat wrote

We have a forum set up on one of our sites for members to use to discuss their business practices, meetups, etc. The forum is already members only, but we've noticed some posts will show up in search engine results pages. What's the best way to prevent these pages from coming up in the SERPs?

Change the permissions (Options > Users > Change Permissions) so that those in the "Anyone" group do NOT have the "View" permission and add the "View" permission to those in the "Registered" group.

If you have implemented a manual membership system, then give the "View" permission to "Members" rather than "Registered".

All users (including search engines) are then presented with a Login Screen which a search engine cannot get through as they will not have registered or not be in the "Members" group.

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NAML

[GregChapman]

Any search engine is stopped dead by a login procedure. I was answering on the basis that yours was a stand alone forum, and if yours is a only linked then that is what you need to do.

If you wish your forum to be protected by your site's login procedure then you must both embed it AND set the "Redirect to" option so the forum can never display outside the page in which it is embedded.

Once embedded then you can remove any of the restrictions I mentioned.