MyBB Community Forums

Well I'll keep this short. On my wrestling forum we have things called "live discussion threads", where we discuss the show live on the forum, naturally that generates a lot of activity. We normally have a lot of guests browsing the discussion thread and Google loves to crawl it.

Guests can view everything on the forum, but should I disable guests seeing threads on days where WWE is airing live? It'd probably result in a lot of extra sign ups, since we attract quite a few lurkers (since they come, read the news/results/feedback of the show and leave) and disabling them to view threads might encourage them to sign up and perhaps post.

Would doing that harm any SEO factors? I mean we get a lot of content those days, averaging around 1,400 posts, which is exactly double our daily average and Google seems to have a field day. What would you do?

I'm fairly sure that restricting access to googles crawler is massively harmful for seo. I think I remember reading that somewhere.

Wouldn't be permanently, would just be every Monday, and one Sunday a month.

I browse certain sport sites during the games.

The ones I encountered where I have to register in order to view, I just left & found alternatives.

So unless you're the only option out there, locking it to guest only may not be the best idea.

You may be losing a certain portion of your traffic.

Maybe you can have a plugin developed for you where they can only view a certain amount of the posts or for just a certain amount of time? I saw a thread the other day where Solidus had wanted to block the second page...that can be a solution for you, possibly.

Hmm, that second page plugin could be great. How would that work with Google though?

I think (if I don't try the above) I'll stick with letting guests see everything.

(2012-02-23, 01:09 AM)Anxiety Wrote: [ -> ]Hmm, that second page plugin could be great. How would that work with Google though?

I think (if I don't try the above) I'll stick with letting guests see everything.

I'm not entirely sure. You can probably stop it from even reading the pages more then 1 with some simple tweaks I'm sure. The team at WebOutfit would love to code this plugin for you for a very low price. Contact me if you're interested .

(2012-02-23, 01:09 AM)Anxiety Wrote: [ -> ]Hmm, that second page plugin could be great. How would that work with Google though?

I think (if I don't try the above) I'll stick with letting guests see everything.

If the plugin developer's smart at all they'd stop it from affecting any MyBB recognised Search Engine bots.

Could be something I'm interested in whilst I gather the funds. If it could display a custom message and include HTML for example it could be a very good plugin.

It really wouldn't be all that difficult. I'm sure one of the developers at codicious would be willing to help if need be