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Should I allow search engine bots?

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Should I allow search engine bots?  

21 members have voted

  1. 1. Should I allow search engine bots?

    • Yes
      13
    • No
      2


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The benefit of allowing bots is to make the site more visible to search engines, especially when someone searches for a topic we discuss.

The minus is the privacy issue. Some people may not want this forum to come up when someone searches for them. Of course, you shouldnt be using your real name as your nick anyway...

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  • 5 months later...

Absolutely, YES, you should allow search engine bots!

1) If you have a site on the internet that no one can find, you may as well avoid the bother of uploading it, and just gaze upon it on your local machine. It's a pain in the ass to find this site. (I just added it to google by going to http://www.google.com/addurl.html. But if you've disabled spiders with the ROBOTS.txt file, then it still will never find you no matter how much it looks.)

2) If you're really concerned about privacy, put a mention in the agreement that you have us sign.

3) People who write on the internet know that what they're writing is in public view. If they say something stupid that they wish they hadn't, well, tough luck. The way to avoid that is to not say stupid stuff in public. Besides, if someone really cares about that, then they probably aren't going to use their real name anyway.

Most people probably will use their real names. After all, the publicity of it is what makes the internet fun and interesting and unique, right?

You should also encourage those of us with websites to link back to this forum. I did.

On top of that, you should see what can be done to make the XHTML and CSS as standards-compliant as possible. This makes your code more forward compatible, and often leads to a higher ranking on search engines. It looks like you just have to turn your <br>s into <br />s. Everything must be closed in XHTML, and that's the doctype that you're using. Any tag that doesn't close, like img or meta or link, must have the /> at the end, to signify that it is closing as soon as it opens. Also, you should put your CSS into a separate style sheet, and link to it from your XHTML. That makes for faster load times, and less ugly raw code for text-only systems like palms and screen-readers. And spiders, for that matter.

Search engines are your friend. If your site isn't on Google, it may as well not be on the internet. (I actually only found this site because I found the http://minn.objectivism.net forum, and figured that there must be a "www" address for the domain.)

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  • 1 month later...

I found the site through capmag forums. Unless its very new I've never seen it in a search before. I don't know if a site such as this would be a huge money maker for someone unless you sold t-shirts etc. off of it. You could also have a signup fee. I believe Rush L has a fee to access his site. Of course that could backfire because the "brand" of the site is not that well known and no-one may pay yet for access.

What the heck do I know though.

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