paid subscriptions & seo

Hi,

Say if i force my users to have to subscribe before they can view my forum's content. Will this affect my forum's crawlability from a search engine bot's perspective? Will they be blocked as well because of this restriction?

Or is it more recommended to have the general parts of the forum open to the public, while some areas they have to pay for?

I would be interested to hear some of your suggestions...

Thank you,
Alex
GOsatellite.com

Anything that requires subscription will not be available to the search engines for indexing, unless you do some kind of cloaking, which is not recommended.

As much content available for search engines as possible is a good practise. However, if your business model is based on subscription, then you really have no choice but to restrict access to premium content.

In that case (as you mentioned), just try to identify as much content as possible that can be maintained for public access as a teaser to your subscription content.

Note: If anyone else is running a subscription based business model, please provide your insights for this customer.

Say if i force my users to have to subscribe before they can view my forum's content. Will this affect my forum's crawlability from a search engine bot's perspective? Will they be blocked as well because of this restriction?

Yes, they will not be able to see your content.

Or is it more recommended to have the general parts of the forum open to the public, while some areas they have to pay for?

It is important to leave your forums that contain your quality content open to search engines. I have private forums for paid subscribers but none of the forums can be considered quality. They are mainly off topic forums. The forums that contain the valuable information on the subject of my forum are left open to everyone.