Xenforo SEO and Search Engine Indexing

[Simon Byrne]

Hey All

On my forum you can view the main page and click on any forum but too view a thread you need to sign up. I want google to crawl and index the content of the threads, is there any way around this or an add-on for the job?

Simon

 

[FredC]

Hey All

On my forum you can view the main page and click on any forum but too view a thread you need to sign up. I want google to crawl and index the content of the threads, is there any way around this or an add-on for the job?

Simon

i believe that would be a violation of Googles TOS. Google calls it Cloaking...

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Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelinesbecause it provides our users with different results than they expected.

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users
• Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

If your site uses technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash, see our recommendations for making that content accessible to search engines and users without cloaking.

If a site gets hacked, it’s not uncommon for the hacker to use cloaking to make the hack harder for the site owner to detect. Read more about hacked sites

 

[TPerry]

Not legitimately. Google will only index what guests can see. Tricking it to do otherwise is a violation of their TOS from my understanding.

 

[Simon Byrne]

i believe that would be a violation of Googles TOS. Google calls it Cloaking...

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Not legitimately. Google will only index what guests can see. Tricking it to do otherwise is a violation of their TOS from my understanding.

Thanks for the replies guys. I think you are probably right, i looked it up and google offers a first click free solution so what i will do is open up the forum and use this https://xenforo.com/community/resources/limit-thread-views-session-for-guests.4840/ to limit guest views. I am within the TOS doing that,