I own a private forum and unregistered users can view the Forum, Thread topics but not the Thread content! I have VBSEO Installed with the defaults. My question is, I am trying to get more organic traffic from yahoo/msn/google but how can I since the forum is private and the crawlers cant see my content? What can I do?
You could make the threads themselves only viewable to search engine crawlers, but thats a big no-no with Google. You could also make the forum public, but limit the viewing of them by unregistered users (they can only see XXX number of characters of each post, they can't see any code snippets, they can't see quotes, you can only limit them to 5 page views, etc) Google "limited guest viewing mod" for vBulletin. It lets you limit the number of pages an unregistered person can view. After that it tells them to register. It will still show all pages to search engine crawlers
great! Thank you, I just made my forum public (except for a secret room) - And downloaded/installed that plugin you mentioned. But one problem, I found this information on another forum check it out: http://www.vbseo.com/f4/limited-guest-viewing-mod-vb-org-20890/#post151699 Would you think it is still wise to use this plugin ??
I've used the limited guest viewing mod and Google has yet to penalize the site (100,000 uniques per month)
Can you tell me which settings you chose in the vboptions? Like how many views until needing to register etc...