Pages increases and then decreases?

Alright then, I guess I'll have to move over since you are totally right here. But anyway, I have heard that it's always a bad idea to disable guests to view any posts or threads but it doesn't effect the search engine bots at all 'cause I've installed a special hack where it allows the SE's to index and crawl the threads without having the guest's permission to be set to on, you know. Here's a message from one of the members on vBulletin.org.

Hi Josh,

I just ran a few pages of your site through a few search engine spider test tools and so far all results have come back negative - meaning that unless I'm very much mistaken, the hack you mentioned isn't working.

To be absolutely certain I even ran a "site:" search query on Google to check see how many pages you have indexed. It returned a very high figure, 8,530, in fact. However, do you know that the only page it displays is your forums index page? Everything else is listed under 'omitted results' because every page other than that appears to similar to be primarily displayed. See for yourself: (link)

And if the hack you mentioned is working - then you may have to worry about "cloaking" too.

If I'm wrong then I apologise and I insist you prove me wrong (believe me I want to be wrong! I would love nothing more to affiliate with an established site such as yours. If you decide to enable guest viewing then I urge you to reply and let me know and I will add your link in a heartbeat.

I just want you to know that you are really, really shooting yourself in the foot by disallowing guest viewing. I really can't stress that enough. I can understand your point as to why you are doing this but it's certainly something you need to think twice about.

Hope I didn't come across as rude at all. Please be aware that that was not my intention. I look forward to hearing from you.

So, can any of the vBSEO staff answer to this post please? I am really getting paranoid over here.

And if you're wondering which hack I'm using, then here's the one:

Member Bots 1.0 - Allow bots to act as members - vBulletin.org Forum

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

Google has said many times that the "site:domain.com" search is inaccurate and could vary each time you search depending on which data center you hit.

Don't spend your time worrying about those numbers. Track your progress by using something like Google Analytics and watching traffic and search engine referral numbers.

I already did reply.

But yes, it is generally considered a "bad idea" to block guests from viewing your content and allow bots to view it. As noted, it can be considered "cloaking".

Meh okay I guess but the main reason why I've disabled this is because I don't want people just to lurk around my forum, grab my content/information and post them on some other site without crediting us for the very least.

Guess I'll have to enable this option then... Thanks, Keith!

Alright I think you guys were right. My indexed pages couldn't go even higher but because of that stupid hack that I was using and restricting the SE's to view posts/threads on my forum so yeah. I have enabled this feature on and everything seems to work just fine though I have disabled SE's to view member's profile page. I was wondering if that would be alright?