Disallowing guests and SEo

[Cedric_FP]

I own a writing forum and the users have recently become worried about copyright security.

So in the interest of security, I have made viewing the actual contents of threads disallowed for guests, however, you can still see the list of threads when you click into the forum.

Now, as I understand it, search engines will now be be able to see all the threads, but when they try to go in, will be greeted with the same "please log in" page.

How will this affect my SEO? Are there any useful things I can do to avoid penalties? Would I be better off disallowing guests from even viewing what threads and in the forums altogether?

BTW, I am using VB 3.6.8

[jimbo_dk]

Hiding your content to the users will definitely hide it from the SE's as well.

Experts-Exchange tries to get around this situation by posting the actual content deep deep down in the page, where users are less likely to look. This will deter a certain percentage of people, but there is no real solution.

e.g. http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/M..._22772429.html

PS> I'm not sure what you meant, but you won't be receiving any penalties. It's just that there will be no content for the SE's to index. If you do some sort of cloaking (i.e. show the content only to SE bots) you would get a heavy penalty/ban.

[USPB]

You can just block the specific IP on your htacess

[stymiee]

You can just block the specific IP on your htacess

Showing different content to user then for search engines will get your site banned and is a definite bad thing to do. Also, how do block the IPs of all guests?

[akdiver]

I assume you would have enough members and that they join via word of mouth. No way would i bother signing up for a forum if i cant see the infomation. But from an SEO standpoint probably not the best road to go down.