Hi everyone! I need help and your POV's I have a forum but i decided to make all its contents only available for registered users. -- meaning to say that a person have to register first before he can read the whole content of the forum's thread and topics. Does doing this have disadvantages? will Search engines have a hard time crawling the contents of my site? and will my forum still be indexed even contents are private? Thank you in advance
From my POV, i thing better you allowed every user to view your content. Thats make the visitor know at least what is the stuff that inside your site. I think its better for the search engine too to index your site.
If the content isn't available to non-registered users who are not logged in, then the search engines will NOT be able to index that content because they'll be physically unable to register new accounts and log in. The moral of this post? If you want the search engines to find and index your forum content, make it publicly accessible.
Your forum will be indexed if you give bot access to bots. Otherwise not. Disadvantage is that if you have google adsense installed, your ads have no chance to be displayed to non-members. I am sure a big chunk of clicks come off mostly from non-members. Just see any forum like DP, it gives access to non-members also. I guess they must have a reason.