[How To?] Forum Permissions - Guests (inherited) hurting SEO

[Sebas R]

Hi to everybody,

maybe this is an easy fix but I am not finding it where.

At the forum/subforums most of the permission on guests are set to a no view on purpose but those are for the ones who do register to see, I do get the price of google not indexing those pages!

But on general ones like introductions and some basics about the forum it would be very good to have them open to guests, and when I go down to  Forum Permissions - Guests inherited.  They should be available so I did several tests using other browser and pointing the url to those forum or subforums who should be visible hence indexable and they are not!

This is what i shows "You are either not logged in or do not have permission to view this page. This could be because one of the following reasons"


How can I fix this? 

I hate to have almost 20k posts and 400 pages indexed and that is lousy



Thank you for anyone who can shed a light on this since I am now focused mainly on SEO


PS: I am also using Google SEO 1.8.4 plugin and is configured correctly

[nixer55]

Don't think it's an easy fix, because you've already modified guest permissions.  Which is the default group used by spiders / bots - like all other guests in a default install.

You could define desired bots by user agent string in Spiders / Bots.  Then create a new group having all the perms Guests used to have or you need - and assign the created bot to it.  Although not recommended in the ACP.  But you've already gotten off the beaten path - lol.

Only way I know of...

P.S.  Good thing you don't have Google Search Console setup.  Be getting a lot of emails.

[Matt]

Not sure I really follow the problem - where it says inherited it means it'll be inhering permissions from the usergroup. Are you saying you're applying different permissions for the forum to allow them to view, and it doesn't work? In the usergroup settings, if you have "Can view board?" disabled, they won't be able to view any forums regardless of what permissions you set on them.

I also wouldn't suggest anything to set different permissions for bots than regular guests. It's called cloaking and Google takes a very dim view of it. They don't always crawl with a Googlebot user agent, they also crawl with regular user agents, and if they detect that they're served different content when they browse as Googlebot, they'll purge your site from the index and you'll never rank for anything.

If you want most forums to be hidden but allow access to some, you'll need to allow access to all via the usergroup settings, and then set permissions on each individual forum you don't want them to access. In other words, you can't deny all and then selectively allow, you have to allow all and selectively block. Probably a bit of a hassle, but wanting to block the majority of content but also try and have some content indexed is pretty non-standard.

[nixer55]

Good insight on Google's behaviour Matt.

[Sebas R]

Hi Matt and Nixer and thank you for replying,

We have some categories/forums that are visible according to user groups, the more posts they have the more they have access to.

But the case I am having issues with is with entry-level categories/forums where we've set "Guests" with allowed action view and they do not show if you use another browser without login, being a guest!
It always goes to "You are either not logged in or do not have permission to view this page…etc etc etc and it shouldn't I guess

I am not wanting to do any sort of cloaking and my interest is to learn more about doing MyBB SEO the right way and improve some keywords on the google search engine.


On your question :
On custom permissions: Can view forum? Yes, it is checked
On the allowed and disallowed: Guests is an allowed action

I do not know if that "Guests (inherited)" is screwing this up or it is something so simple I am missing out here
you can see a screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/ISyvm1Z

Thank you for trying to help me out!