SEO on Private Forum??

[voclain]

My site has been a private site since the beginning. If you go to my site and you are not logged in, you can see nothing. If you log in as a registered user you can still see nothing. Only if you pay for access can you now see what is inside.

I have been studying up a lot lately on SEO and have discovered that Google just loves those long-descriptive-urls-in-the-title.

So that got me to thinking, I have massive content! We all know how much Google “loves” words!!! My forum has over 2 million post!!! Google should just love me....if they can read it???

I’m assuming that it cannot because I have the “Unregistered” user group set to all NO. Is that correct?

If I want my site to remain private, but I want it to also be loved by Google, what do you recommend? How would you set it up?

I have really simplified my site since the first of the year! I am now on the cloud and have done away with my server. This has substantially reduced costs! And the new features, mobile capibilities, advertising opportunities and such has my existing membership really really excited!!!

Now I want to start attracting NEW membership. I’m thinking making my site super SEO friendly could be a difference maker. I’m open for any and all suggestions.

Thank you so much for your help!

Kirk

[LockedOnLaw]

Your options are limited. Bots pay little or no attention to robots.txt files. You could use .htaccess to allow or disallow different parts of the site. You could manually submit sitemaps which only index the "public" portions of your site. Frankly, SEO is overrated. It's not some miracle cure for slow or dead forums. But to the extent it might be of any benefit whatsoever if the search engines can't access the content they can't index it. So, ultimately, you can either have a private site or SEO but not both.

[Wayne Luke]

I'm assuming that it cannot because I have the 'Unregistered' user group set to all NO. Is that correct?

If I want my site to remain private, but I want it to also be loved by Google, what do you recommend? How would you set it up?

Google will only index what guests can see. If guests cannot see content, then Google won't index it. Maybe opening a portion of your content to guests will help you achieve your goals.