Security and SEO

[truthaddict]

I have two semi-related questions regard vB 3.

1. We are considering putting a few hidden forums up on one of our sites. It would be imperative that these forums are not discovered or accessible by anyone other than someone we give specific access to. In other words, we can't take the chance of someone "bumping into" these forums by accident or intentionally scouring our site looking for them and locating them. Assuming we set the permissions up properly, should this be something we should be concerned about? How does the security of hidden forums in vBulletin compare with that of other commercial and custom applications designed to do the same thing?

2. I've looked a little into search engine optimization for vBulletin and it seems a pretty confusing subject. There are a number of fairly detailed and complex tutorials on how to optimize vBulletin for the engines. I'm wondering if anyone can comment on whether all of this effort is worth it. Obviously if you have a lot of content in your forums you want to get Google and the other enginees to index it. At the same time, there's a trade-off in which the extra work just isn't worth it. Anyone care to comment?

[Steve Machol]

1. Of course this can be done. You can't see the hidden forums on this site, can you?

2. With vB3 you don't need to do anything special to 'optimize' for search. It is inherently indexable by the major search engines, including Google.

[truthaddict]

Thanks for the quick reply Steve.

No, I can't see the hidden forums on this site. However, the fear that we have is that someone might be able to somehow access these forums and view sensitive company data. In an ideal world, we would build a special secure application from the ground up to ensure the level of security we are looking for. Having said that, I am hoping that if we properly set up the security and permissions for vBulletin then that will suffice. Any comments?

As for the SEO stuff, that sounds great. If it is inherently indexable am I right in assuming that the detailed SEO tutorials I have seen are simply for those looking to maximize results (through increasing keyword density, moving keywords into the site's headers, etc.)? Basically what I'm wondering is whether there are any relatively easy ways to improve search engine ranking for message board content.

[Floris]

- Setup special usergroup, special forum; and their permissions to make sure only members in that usergroup have access to that forum, and then only by individual user access masks yes/no

- Setup the forum options to be a private forum, so it isn't visible if any permissions are accidently set incorrectly.

- Setup the forum to have a password, so only those who know the password, know the forumid and are in that usergroup, and have their access mask set to yes .. can access it. So even if they share it, they also need to share their forum user/pass in order to compromise access (which by then makes it clear someone has leaked it).

Of course, as with everything, nothing is 100% perfectly safe. One could exploit the services on the web server and compromise server access or mysql database access and manipulate the data, or simply read out the threads/posts - since they are stored in plain text.