Letting your site be indexed, but restricting 'reading' of posts to members?

[jilly]

As of right now, the posts on our board are hidden from search engine spiders - I am considering making them visible, so it would be easier for people searching to find the board - however, is there a way to let the board be indexed, but if someone clicks on a link from google to read a post, they have to register before they can read it?

 

[FansofRealityTV]

Not that I'm aware of. Spiders are just like guests, and have the same access. You can't give a spider access, and not a guest. And even so, someone searching Google could just hit "View cached version" and see the whole thing, without hitting your site.

 

[rex_b]

Not that I'm aware of. Spiders are just like guests, and have the same access. You can't give a spider access, and not a guest. And even so, someone searching Google could just hit "View cached version" and see the whole thing, without hitting your site.

Well I think you could. There are cloaking techniques that allow you to serve spiders whatever information you want them to see.

Also you could set the IP of the spiders to be members, so when they come onto your site they are fed member stuff instead of guests.

 

[pablo]

just leave it open access when the spiders are around and then close it when they are off spinning their webs.

 

[Lugh]

Also you could set the IP of the spiders to be members

I wonder could you make the 'description' of the spiders--which can be entered in Admin CP--a member?

 

[FansofRealityTV]

You can't make a spider a "member", regardless of the IP or description, because you can't pass it a cookie, and you can't make it "log in" the first time.

 

[MaXBoost]

lol, come spider you know you wanna be a member

:cookoo:

 

[Lugh]

lol, come spider you know you wanna be a member

:cookoo:

The itsy-bitsy one

 

[Tombot]

I think there is a way to do it with mod-rewrite in .htaccess, because I've seen private membership sites do it. Couple of things though. One, like FORT said, if the pages are cached in Google, users can see them that way. Two, I think if the people at Google catch on to what you are doing, they won't like it at all. Their users will be expecting certain content, when all they really get is your no permission page. Just my opinion though, I don't know for a fact that they won't like it.

 

[quentin]

have to agree with tombot, if google visits your pages, they will be cached and so people will see it in the cache. cloaking can indeed lead to being banned if one of your competitor reports you. and finally, as a user, if i search for something in google and arrive to a register page, i will just go back to serps and open the next link...

 

[Jon]

But you can make certain pages invisible to guests/spiders like a private forum of some kind, I will pretty much be doing the same thing. There's just some things that will be posted that prying eyes won't need to see unless they choose to register.