MyBB Community Forums

Dear Sir / Madam,
Good Day!
Please add a new user group in MyBB 1.8 for search engine bots instead of assigning them Guest user group. If I want to change permissions for guests it shouldn't effect search engine bots.

it's just my personal opinion.

Best Regards,

The point of a search engine bot is to see the same content as a guest browsing the forum.

(2014-06-23, 03:42 PM)dragonexpert Wrote: [ -> ]The point of a search engine bot is to see the same content as a guest browsing the forum.

In some scenarios I suppose you'd want search engines to see more content for the purpose of indexing/SEO, while at the same time making guests have to register to see the content.

You can already do this, all you have to do is make the new group, go through the task of assigning the permissions you want this group to have and then visiting the spiders/bots configuration in the ACP and assinging the spiders/bots to use the new usergroup.


You should note that any savvy user can find your content by simply changing their user-agent, or looking for the page cached on search engines, for example Google.

For the actual suggestion of adding this feature to MyBB 1.8, it's not viable. The board administrator would be required to setup the permissions for every forum for the spider/bot group which would lead to a whole lot of support requests here of "why isn't my content on Google", "what is a spider/bot", etc. As I stated, you can easily do it yourself if need be.

One issue with this also is it is a great way to destroy your SEO. It can lead to penalities in SEO or banning of your site from search results. Do a Google Search for SEO Bad Practices.

(2014-06-23, 08:09 PM)dragonexpert Wrote: [ -> ]One issue with this also is it is a great way to destroy your SEO. It can lead to penalities in SEO or banning of your site from search results. Do a Google Search for SEO Bad Practices.

You're right. I personally don't do it as I think it's the same principle as people who use hide tags; they're useless. Why would someone want a user to register just to look at a thread, or just to say "plz let me see content". I however see this done all the time within forums, it's even done on the largest of MyBB boards including HackForums owned by Labrocca. However, I'm not really sure if it'd count as technically if you register you'd be getting the same content.

I personally have created a Spiders group with almost the same privileges as the Guest group. The differences (beside username style) are that spiders can't access the calendar, PM system, nor post. On my board, guests can post in a tech-support forum (eg. ask for help in registering).

Thanks all, i have made new user group "Robots" & assigned it to all search bots. now whatever i do with guest user group it wont effect search engine spiders.

You know you can always use a robots.txt file to block unwanted pages or actions.

(2014-06-24, 01:21 PM)dragonexpert Wrote: [ -> ]You know you can always use a robots.txt file to block unwanted pages or actions.

yes i know about robots.txt & SEO but making a new user group for search engine bots is an easy option. many thanks.

(2014-06-24, 10:34 AM)mybbworld Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks all, i have made new user group "Robots" & assigned it to all search bots. now whatever i do with guest user group it wont effect search engine spiders.

It will as long as the search engines match the user agents of those in the spiders/bots section.

You can test that with Google's 'fetch as Google' tool in Google webmaster tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/...etch?pli=1