Can a private forum of mine NOT be index by Google?

[VB-evaluator]

I'm looking hard at VB. A recent thread here has people asking how to ensure their forum threads/posts are searchable by Google.

I'd like my future forum to DEFINITELY NOT be searchable via Google.

In fact, I'm quite thankful that I ran across that thread. I could very well have been posting all kinds of "interesting" info on my future forum and not know (perhaps) that Google is indexing for all to see.

How can I ensure that my threads/posts are NOT indexed by Google or any other search engine?

[Floris]

You can goto Google and find out what robots.txt file to make for your site index to tell Google not to index your pages.

Or don't allow guests to view your forum, for all Google will get is a permission denied page.

Note that when you are on the internet, search index crawlers with both good and bad intentions will always spider any link they see, if you tell them to or not. Besides google there is a lot more.

[VB-evaluator]

Or don't allow guests to view your forum, for all Google will get is a permission denied page.

Will denying permissions be good enough? If permissions are denied, are the posts/threads encrypted? If so great, but if not, will a smart search engine be able to pick up what someone wrote? Some of the info will be confidential.

[cirisme]

You could simply deny guests viewing of forums, threads, event the forum, then only people that have registered can view stuff.

Posts aren't encrypted in vBulletin. But when this is on, they are invisible to guests.

[Floris]

Like with every forum software, threads and posts aren't displayed encrypted, but in plain text. Otherwise when you read a thread, you can't view it.

It is a permission for usergroups to see threads by themselves, others or view forums yes/no. Some forums can be set password protected.

A guest is part of the unregistered usergroup, you can set the permission to 'no' for 'can view forum'. There is no way around this. A guest can't see any of the content if they do not have the permission.

If you want a private forum, place it on a intranet and not on the internet. Or .htaccess password protect the forum and moderate registrations.

The point of the internet is to have a global reachability of central points of information to everybody.