[Forum] Making Forums Unsearchable by Google

[Cort]

Is there a way to block Google from searching some of the forums on my site?

[Andy]

Create a file called robots.txt and place it in your forum directory, or one level below your forum folder if there is one. Put the following in robots.txt file.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

[djbaxter]

Create a file called robots.txt and place it in your forum directory, or one level below your forum folder if there is one. Put the following in robots.txt file.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Very funny. But it doesn't answer the question.

Cort, what you do is make the forum non-viewable by Guests (i.e., only logged in members can view the specified forums). There is more than one way to do this but the simplest is:

1. Go to Admin CP | Forums and Moderators | Forum Permissions
2. Scroll down to the forums you don't want indexed and click on Edit next to Unregistered / Not Logged In
3. Set permissions to All No
4. Save

[Andy]

Oops, yes the robots example above would disallow all the forums to be indexed.

It's unclear if the OP wants to restrict "Unregistered / Not Logged In" from viewing this specific forum, or just restrict Google from indexing it?

[Cort]

Thanks for the info. Interesting - after thinking about it I would actually like guests to be able to view those forums but for the posts not to show up on Google. These are 'community lounge' and 'personal story' forums.

[Cort]

Create a file called robots.txt and place it in your forum directory, or one level below your forum folder if there is one. Put the following in robots.txt file.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

if I was to do this I would place robots.txt in the root Forum directory and then in the file

Disallow: / put the names of forums that I want to target? For instance I would want to target the 'Community Lounge' and "Introduce Yourself' forums that are embedded in the 'Community' section.

Would I put

Disallow: /"Community Lounge" " Introduce Yourself" or
Disallow:/ "Community/Community Lounge" or ???

[Andy]

Browse to your Community Lounge forum and note the forumnid number. If the "f=number" is 5 then you would put the following in your robots.txt file:

/forumdisplay.php?f=5

The one problem is that if someone were you link a thread or post in this forum, Google can follow that threads and index it. So the only real way of keeping Google from indexing those forums is to make the forum private and only allow members to view it.