SEO Searchable? Starting a New Forum for Company Community

[Pedram_SEO]

Hi Mozzers,

I'm new here and am looking forward to learning from this awesome group of SEOs

As my company's Web Optimization Manager, I'm in charge of just about anything SEO related. We are an education company and we are looking to build a new forum so students (both new and old) and continue interacting within our community.

We also want to use this as a tool for new users and potential new customers through search (obviously). We are in an internal debate as to how we should make the forums and the implications on search it may have. Some managers want the content available only to members, others want the content read-only to the public, and the tech team building the forum says that "it'll be an issue making the content available to the public without a log-in." So my questions are:

(1) Will we still be searchable if we make our content "read-only" for non-members? Members will have the ability to log-in and comment and post etc (similar to this forum).

(2) Will be searchable if we make the content completely private and available only to members. What I mean by private is perhaps, we'll make the title of the forum thread public but not the actual responses. Along these lines, what would happen if we made everything private (including the tite). Will Google still pick up on our content in a search result and a potential user only not be able to see anything?

(3) What would you all suggest to make this flow the right way?

Hope to hear from you all soon. Thanks

[OlegKorneitchouk]

My guess is that it would either be a setting or a plugin for your forum script of choice.

Basically, it would consider googlebot a logged in user and display all the forum threads/replies.

[Pedram_SEO]

Thanks, Oleg!

How do you make something viewable to googlebot but not viewers? I am still a young SEO afterall!

Anyone else?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Few things you can do.

1. As long as Google can index the text, it will appear in the SERPs. So making it read only is fine.

2. If you just show the title to Google, that's all that will be indexed. You'll probably be missing out on a bunch of long tail keywords and quality content from the conversations.

3. Make the content viewable to googlebot but not viewers. That way you get your privacy and let Google know about the conversations going on within.

Note: Non-members can still view the content via Google's cached version of the page but most people don't know about that feature. They also wouldn't be able to post from the cached copy.

Cheers,
Oleg