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Curious about Google vs Restricted Forums

MY My
My
Member

I have a couple of forums that are restricted to only display for people added to a certain group (they’re paid subscribers) all other members & guests are set to “no access” so the forums don’t even display for them BUT I just discovered today that posts in these forums are actually showing up in Google results. People won’t see the content and of course if they click on it they won’t have access but the title of the topic is right there for all to see. 

I’m curious why this happens.. and now that I know it does I’m going to have to be super careful in future what goes into the titles of topics in those forums…

5 Answers

New Answer

BR Brandon
Brandon
Member

Do you have “Include this forum in sitemap” turned on for those forums? The setting is in the Manage Groups & forums panels. Google could b picking it up from there.

MY My
My
Member

I must be blind… or just having too long a day ’cause I can’t find that setting…

BR Brandon
Brandon
Member

I’m sorry I should have said… If you have the Simple:Press Google XML sitemaps plugin installed and activated then check that setting. You must not have it setup. Is there another sitemap plugin installed that might be creating links to those pages?

MY My
My
Member

Ahh… no, I don’t have any sitemap plugins installed

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member

then we do nothing about telling google anything about your forum…  the crawler would have to self discover…  the only way we can tell google what to index is through a sitemap…

if you really want to control what google crawls, you need a robots.txt (which really wont help this) and a sitemap… then google limits to the sitemap..