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[Stripey]

Is this really necessary? One of my pet hates is clutter in search results from forums, but I wonder how your users feel about you not denying robots access to the site and actually making it easier for all this stuff to be archived by search engines.

[Cloud]

I don't think there's anything wrong with it, as Neil doesn't insist on people using real identities on here. The privacy angle would be a lot more concerning if he did insist upon it - but, as far as I can tell, the policy on here is to learn towards not mentioning things by name - with a lot of allegations being jumped on from a very great height if they aren't substantiated.

[Neil]

Originally Posted by Stripey

Is this really necessary? One of my pet hates is clutter in search results from forums, but I wonder how your users feel about you not denying robots access to the site and actually making it easier for all this stuff to be archived by search engines.

You're right, it isn't necessary, but I want people to be able to find the content posted on this web site easily from the likes of Google and Yahoo and so it makes sense to do some SEO.

How are new users expected to find this web site if they don't know it exists in the first place? They do so through search engines.

I seriously don't think that there will be that many users out there that don't realise search engines automatically index content posted to public forums. If they have a problem with it then they shouldn't be posting anything on any web site in my opinion. Think of all the personal information posted on people's MySpace pages for example - all that is indexed by Google as well.