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Exposing the forum to search engines

phil8phil8
edited July 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
I've got vanilla up and running, however I would like the search engines to index the discussions. I believe this can be exposed through the RSS feed???? How can this be done? Here it is: http://www.mongoliaexpat.com/forum/ Thanks

Comments

  • jmatthew3jmatthew3
    Hey there it's my understanding that the search engines will naturally index your site. You're not going to get fully indexed right away, but it will happen eventually. having an RSS feed won't necessarily help you, but I could be wrong.
  • phil8phil8
    Here's the thing: The forum is password protected and the search engines cannot properly browse the content. How can I have the forum password protected, but expose the content to the search engines??
  • lechlech ✭
    Better question: Why the hell would you want to even consider that? I'm only asking this in fairness due to the fact that if it's a private forum, what benefit would you have to keeping it as such.
  • Nice PaulNice Paul
    Google will penalise you by removing your site completely if you serve up content to search engines which is not available publicly to site visitors.

    From a user perspective, clicking an apparently relevent search result and being taken to a login screen is a pointless waste of time. That will simply drive traffic away from your site.
  • bjrnbjrn
    Better question: Why the hell would you want to even consider that? I'm only asking this in fairness due to the fact that if it's a private forum, what benefit would you have to keeping it as such.
    Exactly, why would you have a log-in requirement for people, but let search engines see things (and in extension people see it though the search engines)? If you want search engines to see your forum, turn on public browsing.

    But sure, I guess you can link to your RSS feed from the login page if you want that. I hope you realise that the feeds (as they are when you install the extensions) show not only topic titles, but contents of posts as well. :)
  • ToivoToivo New
    you want higher pagerank but closed forum? publish just some materials to the public. some discussions, some quotes ...
  • phil8phil8
    edited July 2006
    Thanks for the input....i'm going public browsable with the forums. By the way, Mongolia is quite a place. Check out the latest issue of MongoliaExpat magazine; Including a Mongolian Vodka tasting review and pictures from the Gobi. http://www.mongoliaexpat.com
  • lechlech ✭
    If you're going public, then there's really no need to "expose" it to search engines really as long as they can find a link to the forum then you're fine. The only thing I might suggest is adding the friendly URL addon (read the directions, it's at the add-on site) and it might improve relevance and ranking of the discussions via engines like google. Unless someone comes along and decides to create a sitemap.xml specific for vanilla which is recompiled with each new topic added, there's nothing I can think of which will help indexing beyond that.
This discussion has been closed.