Best way to restrict spiders from certain forums?

[moleculo]

I have a few forums that I want to restrict the google/yahoo/etc. spiders from crawling. What is the best way to do this? I have already removed them from the sitemap generation, but google still wants to index them (and I'm trying to funnel google toward other content). Should I just add the forums URLS to robots.txt, or is there a better way?

[Brian Cummiskey]

You can either use robots.txt or set the fourm permissions so that guests can't view them, only members.

[moleculo]

I want guests to be able to see them...I just don't want google wasting time there. Google is obsessed with some forums on my site that add almost zero SEO value. So it sounds like robots.txt is the only way to go? Should I use the VBSEO URLs in the robots.txt or the default vBulletin urls?

[Brian Cummiskey]

Yes, in this case, robots.txt is the only safe way to block it.

You should use
disallow: /nice-forum/
style