XF 1.2 Google and SEO question regarding xF's attachments.

[darren]

I've come over from vB and have set my forum up so guests can not see attachments in the hope it will motivate guests to join and be an active part of the community.

I've had a sitemap on vB and I now have one on my converted vb to XF forum and I've noticed that google is complaining about attachments not being viewable, mainly image files. It never did this on vb so I'm guessing xF handles it differently.

So my question is what would you do? deny access to attachments folder via robots.txt? allow attachments to public? or an alternative?

 

[Paul B]

Robots have the same permissions as guests so if you restrict viewing attachments to guests, the same applies to robots.

I just allow guests to view attachments.

I see a lot of sites don't but I'm not really sure why as it doesn't really achieve much other than you get some additional non-posting members who sign up just to view them.

 

[darren]

Thanks Brogan.

I've just had a look again on Google webmaster tools website and the links are:

http://www.mysite.com/community/attachments/photo-jpg.1429/

I'm assuming the spiders have found the attachment dir? or is this directly associated from a post on the forum with the attachment?

If it's just trying to crawl the attachments dir then I can disallow it via robots.txt surely?

 

[darren]

Sorry I'm being dumb it would not have found the attachment directory contents, it must be from posts in the site so yes I will open it up to guests as you are entirely right that it would probably only attract no post users anyway.