Allow guests to browse the forum

[cuongvttt]

Hello guys,

When I disable this feature "Allow guests to browse the forum", I wonder if Google Bot can index topics on my forum?

Thank you so much.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Google can only see what guests can see.

[cuongvttt]

Thank you so much for the information and have a good day, bro.

[cuongvttt]

Is there anyway to allow Google Bots as an exception?

[Arantor]

Is there anyway to allow Google Bots as an exception?

No, and Google really doesn't like it if you show them content that you don't show to regular guests. It's very regularly a huge penalty as some other forums discovered like Experts Exchange.

[cuongvttt]

Thanks, Arantor. Is there anyway to limit number of topics that guests can view? This is a great feature of Quora.

[Arantor]

Which will also limit the ability of Google to index your forum which will make it harder to get search traffic. (And no, again, giving Google a magic pass doesn't help here either.)

[Kindred]

As said,  no... and doing that defeats the very core purpose of a forum

[Sir Osis of Liver]

There were several 2.0 mods that allowed admins to restrict guest access to topics -

https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?action=mods;search=guest+topics

None have been updated to 2.1, but they're fairly simple and may work in 2.1.  I would guess they've not been updated because they're generally considered to be a bad idea, for reasons posted above.