XF 1.5 Hiding Forum from Search Engine

[AutoAttack Games]

Hi there,

We've recently made one of our forums read-only. Rather than deleting it, we made it read-only out of respect for our users and so they can access old content there. However, one issue is that things from the forums continue to pop up in search engine results, which hurts the SEO for our product - it's wrongly bringing users to an old/no longer supported/read-only forum.

Any recommendations on how to leave the forums up in a read-only state but discourage search engines from showing results linking to the forums? If not, I'm afraid we'll eventually need to delete them entirely.

Thank you.

 

[Brad Padgett]

Create a file called robots.txt and put it in the at the very root of public_html on your server.

Include these lines.

User-agent: * Disallow: /forums/

Replace "/forums" with the directory location of your forum as it is to the main server directory. This will discourage all search engines from indexing your forum and will keep them off your site.

 

[AutoAttack Games]

Much appreciated, Brad.

 

[AndyB]

Allow only the logged in members to view that particular forum. Here is an example using the Main forum, you will select your particular forum as needed.