Hi, On a new forum, would it be a better option to disable guest views, Only registered members can browse the topics and posts. Will it be good idea. Please answer...
You must keep in mind that bots are generally considered guests and if they can not see what is said then there is NO spider food! No spider food, then no spider excrement (in the form of SERPs)
you must feed the Bots! I always try to make as MUCH content available to guests as possible. I have member-only areas, but for specific subjects only. If visitors/guests cant see what your site is about, why would they bother to sign up or come back? and more importantly, you need to make sure there is as much content as possible for the Google Bot to eat.
Alright, thanks for your help... in phpbb Bots setup is already done... but guests cant browse the forum
there is a webmaster forum out there that has something like this set up. I have given them a thumbsdown on stumble, have Xed this sites in my google SERP results, and have thus far refused to even mention them or sign up for an account to see just what I am missing. Why? Because to me it's missleading to allow bots in, but not people... *shrug*
I'd recommend not doing it because you need to allow the bots to crawl your content - so you can get indexed and get some search engine traffic.
If people can not see your forum content, chances are they will not register. When I run across a forum that has hidden its content from the public, I just pass it on by. I "see", or rather I "do not see" a reason to register on those types of sites. I have seen older, well established forums take a serious traffic hit when they made their site private. One forum I used to visit has over 800,000 post. When the owner made the site so bots and guest could not see the content, his membership almost stopped growing. Not to mention his google foot print is almost nothing. Out of over 800,000 post, he might have 3 pages listed with google. That is no way to promote your site.
Make it viewable to everyone, it should be the content not something else that should be attracting visitors and hopefully converting them into members.