Hey, I signed up there the other day (see, you get free traffic from here, too). I thought you were Chaos forums? Is this another project of yours. My real question is I thought it was bad from an SEO point of view to have closed forums to guests. Is this a concious choice you are making, trading off SEO for conversions. I am curious, because I am in the same boat, I know my conversion would go up if I closed some of my forums to guests....but then again, I get to thinking, if a guest won't register on his own, then he probably won't post just because I get him to sign up...and that's the point of getting them to register, so they post and create more content, right?....so, I dunno...Have you noticed any other effect from the conversions, something I am not thinking of?

Thanks for signing up on my site! I think we got fortunate because the content we are blocking is only audio, something Google cant understand (yet,) meaning that we are not hiding any text content from Google. (Also, I think you can get in trouble for showing the Google Spider one thing and guests another.) I decided not to block entire forum sections for the same reasons you mentioned above. I'm using a plug in called sids hide hack that conditionally blocks content within a post. Guests and Google still see the same thing allowing vBSEO to do what it does so well.

Do you have a link to the hack? (or if its on vbulletin.org, I'll find it there).

Makes sense about the audio, pretty interesting, before joining here, I really didn't give much thought to whole images / audio not being seen.

Do you see an advantage to having more members that aren't posting vs just having guests? I used to think I wanted members (maybe I still do, to make the place seem busy, a destination, etc.) but since joining here, I have started to think, hey, if they aren't posting anything, what difference does it make, they aren't helping me with content. I am not running adsense, so maybe that changes things somehow that I am not thinking of.

Defiantly. Non posting members can still be driven back to your site via newsletters. They might not want to post now, but they might later. Plus you can always prune accounts I think down the road.

I did find the hack on vbulletin.org: [hide] hack incl post thank you "addon" - vBulletin.org Forum (Takes some editing, but it works just fine in 3.7 beta 3

Off I go to install Beta4! (Yay!)

Excellent growth in your conversions.

Exactly, you want those prospects to sign up, even if they are not actively posting at the moment. Later on you'll be able to convert a percent of that userbase via newsletters, upgraded offerings, services, etc.