How long does it take for "Index New Posts in Search Engine" set to "No" to take effect?

There are certain forums that I have which I would not like to appear in search engine search results. Apparently, several of these have been indexed. A few days ago I discovered that I had the "Index New Posts in Search Engine" setting set to "Yes." I've since updated the setting to "No."

Now I have a few questions.

1. How long before search engine search results don't yield any results for the forums I've applied this setting to?

2. Is there any way to expedite this process?

That setting is for internal search (ie, search.php), not google/etc.

If you don't want bots in it, you should add these forums to your robots.txt file and/or make them not viewable by guests.

1. Simply making that forum unviewable to guests will help prevent it from being indexed in search engines?

2. How would I add a specific forum to my robots.txt file if the forum url looks something like this under my current VBSEO settings?

http://www.mydomain/forums/f29/

1) yes, bots are guests. If you block guests, you block bots from seeing it to.

2) Tutorial how to make a good robots.txt file - vBulletin SEO Forums
and you would use

Disallow: /forums/f29/

format

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

1) yes, bots are guests. If you block guests, you block bots from seeing it to.

2) Tutorial how to make a good robots.txt file - vBulletin SEO Forums
and you would use

Disallow: /forums/f29/

format

Thanks!

Same question again from earlier. How long before those forums gets removed from search engine results?

There's no set time. When ever google decided that its a permanent dead url to them.

Thanks. BTW, will this work to disable my smilies page from being indexed?

Disallow: /forums/misc.php?do=showsmilies

yes

Thanks Bryan. You're always so helpful.

Last question for now. Is it possible to block the bots from viewing a certain page? If so, would I block it like this...?

Disallow: /forums/f17/forum page/

Yup, you can also use * to anything like

Disallow: /forums/f17/*

which will allow /f17/ but nothing as a child of /f17/______

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Yup, you can also use * to anything like

Disallow: /forums/f17/*

which will allow /f17/ but nothing as a child of /f17/______

So that will allow indexing of the main forum page for /f17 but not for the pages within each thread?

correct, or anything else that's a sub-page of f17 including pagination of the forumdisplay, and the threads within f17 (assuming you use /f17/thread-123/ style urls where the forum is a part of the thread url)

Is there a particular reason why someone would want the main sub-page indexed but not the thread content?

Probably not. I was merely using that as an example