Quick Question

[Solar Bang]

Hey Guys,
I see this forum has search engine support and you can make sub forums. Is it possible to make a sub forum private and keep it out of the eye of the search engines, but still have the public (main) forum indexable by the search engines?

[GregChapman]

Solar Bang wrote

Is it possible to make a sub forum private

Yes. At the sub-forum level go to USERS > PERMISSIONS and change the first option from the default, so "anyone" can no longer can view the application. This is certainly true when the top level application is MIXED with FORUM sub-applications. I am less certain about other combinations of applications.

and keep it out of the eye of the search engines, but still have the public (main) forum indexable by the search engines?

There is an option at the top-level of any forum to stop search engines indexing a forum OPTIONS > EDITOR > CHANGE APPEARANCE > Hide contents from search engines. As the change appearance option does not appear on sub-forums, I assume this option is inherited by sub-forums. However, I have to assume that search engine bots are in the "anyone" group, so they will not be able to crawl a hidden sub-forum, regardless of the search engine setting of the top-level forum.

[Solar Bang]

I don't mean to second guess you, but I am no better off than where I left off. I had a guess of my own, I was kinda hoping for a solid answer from a staffer. I believe that search engines can still index private sections unless specified otherwise usually in a file (robots.txt) because they jump from link to link. Most web servers allow them to get through to locked content based on their user agent. (google for example) So, just not sure of the circumstance and it kind of makes a big deal. I would rather use this forum over a paid one but if it comes to privacy, sadly I will probably pay.

[bladezer]

GregChapman wrote

There is an option at the top-level of any forum to stop search engines indexing a forum OPTIONS > EDITOR > CHANGE APPEARANCE > Hide contents from search engines. As the change appearance option does not appear on sub-forums, I assume this option is inherited by sub-forums. However, I have to assume that search engine bots are in the "anyone" group, so they will not be able to crawl a hidden sub-forum, regardless of the search engine setting of the top-level forum.

Yes, since search engines don't have a user name/password for themselves, they can't index anything in that sub-forum.