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Pretty much as the question says, is there any way to stop search engines from crawling a directory? I am working on a Wordpress installation for my site but don't want it to be listed in search engines until it's ready to be shown to the world. I know the simplest way is to password-protect the directory but I had some issues when I tried to implement that so I'd like to see if there's a way to do it without passwords. Thanks in advance.

I run a Chicago Bears forum and my long-term goal to make it the most popular Bears forum on the internet (I know, huge goal). Because of that, I've been focusing on optimizing it for the keywords 'chicago bears forum'. However, being new to SEO, I only checked now and saw the search volume for those keywords is barely 2,000. My question is, and this is probably an an obvious one, should I be switching my focus to more popular keywords such as 'chicago bears news' if I want to increase traffic to my forum?

Hi all, just had a quick question about google results. I help run a sports forum and currently all our topics as seen as "Forum Name • Topic Title". I think that links to topics would appear much more user friendly if I switched the naming to "Topic Title • Forum Name". My question is, would this change affect previous links in any negative way or will google simply update past topics with the new naming convention? Thank in advance.

I just got my first Crawl Report for my forum and it said I have almost 9,000 duplicate pages. When I looked at a sample of them though I saw that many of them were "reply" links. By this I mean the "reply" button was clicked for a topic yet since the crawler was not a member, it just brought them to the login/register screen. Since all the topics would bring you to the same login page I'm assuming it counted all these "reply" links as duplicates. Should I just ignore these or is there some way to fix it? Thanks in advance.

Hi all. I help run the forum at www.bearsfansonline.com and really want to see if there any ways to increase traffic. We started with a core group of posters in 2009 and since then have only added one active user. I'm worried if we don't bring in some fresh faces, my core users will start to leave. That being said, does anyone have ideas how to go about doing this? We've tried holding contests but they haven't resulted in any new sign-ups. Don't really know what else we can do. I'd greatly appreciate any tips, suggestions, etc. Thanks in advance.