Hi guys. Here's an addon I found for VBulletin which I think Vanilla should have.
I'm guessing the suitable way to do this would be to have a new role group with access to view everything but with no other permissions. Avcorse the IP needs to be checked up against the XML file as it say's there.
Sometimes certain categories are set to be not visible to guest's yet have discussions in them which should be indexed. I think this would be a great way of getting them indexed.
A webmaster may want to have content only visible to 'registered' members for the sake of growth, yet he may still want the content to be indexed and listed in google. Other forum system's allow you to be flexible and give each forum category special rights ect ect.
Seeing that Vanilla is still basic we have user role rights & avcorse what roles can participate in a category.
The way suggested will still allow discussions to be indexed and not hinder the webmaster's SEO possibilities. I know you may be asking 'well, what about google's cache'. I guess that's the only negative thing about it (users can click on google cache and view the cache of the page rather than signing up).
Most of the time though people tend to just click on the link itself rather than cache.
What should happen when a user clicks the search link, and is directed to a login page instead? "Bad" cloaking is defined as showing search engines one page designed to rank highly, but directing users to another page instead, often with unrelated content.
This does happen, I.E. New York Times, and many other news sites. My reaction is always to leave. Infact I make it a point to avoid clicking on links if I know they point to NYT. I don't even bother with bugmenot unless its an exclusive story that captures a unusual level of my interest (i.e. once or twice a year.)
There was a lot of talk about a month ago in the SEO blogasphere claiming these registration required pages was cloking... but there was an implicit approval by Google for sites doing this. Webmasterworld once prompted for login on pages that came up in search engines... but now they show the original thread if you come from a link on a search engine. Bookmark it and return later, and you will be prompted to login/register.
I still don't see the point of allowing search engines to index closed forums. It completely defeats having a closed forum or a forum with "special areas" in the first place.