How to prevent user info appearing in Google text?

[MJM]

The following is an example of text that first appears in a Google search of a post in our forums.
Is there anyway to prevent this info from showing up?
This prevents any actual text of the message from showing.

#1. 01-27-2003, 08:04 AM. `Username'. Member. Join Date: Jan 2003. Location: Hartford,Tn. Posts: 2. Send a message via AIM to 'Username'.

[Floris]

Any page a guest can view, Google and other craw spiders can view.
Disable the permission for guest and guests and search spiders get 'permission denied' instead of the details.

[MJM]

No, that is not what I meant. The forums described are public view, and we do want Google to find them... It's just that all you see in the text below the search is info like...
#1. 01-27-2003, 08:04 AM. `Username'. Member. Join Date: Jan 2003. Location: Hartford,Tn. Posts: 2. Send a message via AIM to 'Username'.

Instead, there should show beginning text of post.
I usually only see one or two words of text shown...

Mark

[Floris]

You can use robots.txt to tell google where to go and not to go.

If 'text' is in a web page, google indexes it, it doesn't understand if it is a date, time, text, binairy data, username or email address. It just takes it (basicly) as it is.

Note: there are spiders who ignore robots.txt and still index it. There are over 250 index bots easily that could spider your pages and their data. Unless you prevent the page from public view, you basicly can't block those details from being indexed.

[MJM]

Sorry to take up your time, but this is not what I mean

For example with your above post it mght show on the google search index listing as..

"Floris vBulletin Team Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Netherlands Age: 27
Posts: 12,606 You can use robots.txt to tell google where to go and not to"

So I'm looking for suggestions on positioning this info so it does not show as the first part of text on the Google main index page of a search.

Obviously all of users info would be viewable upon visiting this page, which is fine.

Mark

[Dennis Olson]

That issue is well beyond the scope of vBulletin. All your post data is just "text" to the spiders. They take ALL or NONE. There's no way to get them to "just take certain parts of my text".

[Dennis Olson]

Actually, I think there IS a way, but it would block ALL non-members from seeing the information you refer to. If you add a conditional to the THREADBIT (?) template, requiring a usergroup != 0 in order to display the poster's information, that would stop the spiders from seeing it. As well as non-registered members.

But that'd be the only way.

[MJM]

Okay, thanks Dennis,
Having the user info on the side, would user info still also show up before the text too, on Google search index page?

I had visited a forum a while back that had some of the user info positioned at the bottom of the post, which I didn't care for, but was curious whether that was done to prevent user info showing first.

Mark

[Dennis Olson]

Theoretically, NO non-registered member OR spider would see the information. So Google links followed by a searcher would also not show the information.

It's "everyone" sees it or "no one" does.