Impact on SEO with single post viewing hack

There is a hack on vb org that limits guests to only viewing the first post on any thread.

What would be the impact on SEO if you was to use it?

I can see you being limited on how many pages and threads you get indexed.

Would this affect the site map if you include single page URLs in it

This is the hack in question
Guests First Post Only - vBulletin.org Forum

Well, only terms in the first post would be available for indexing. You would be losing a lot of potential traffic from long tail terms that might be contained in the rest of the text.

Our sitemap would not be compatible. I think it would require a custom modification. Otherwise it would include thread pages it in that bots would not have permission to crawl.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Well, only terms in the first post would be available for indexing. You would be losing a lot of potential traffic from long tail terms that might be contained in the rest of the text.

I think this mod allows SEs to index the entire thread. Limited viewing has effect only to guests.

Why do you keep wanting to hack this stuff? i thought i already yelled at you about this

I'll say it again,
Unless you're a pay/subscription service, Leave it open!

Morning Brian

Your idiot detector has found yet another of my posts

Have a look in critique, there is a man in distress waiting to find out if I'm an idiot or he has server issues

Back to subject

There is another hack that stops people viewing threads after x amount of views and works on cookies in your browser so search bots are un affected.

This one only allows the first post to be seen by people and bots.
The developer considers it bad practise to not block the bots as well.

This one might encourage people to join, donkey and carrot approach. But who needs several thousand non posting members,

exactly. why make them register? they aren't going to stay anyway if they don't want to... so why take up the space and add over-head to your database?


Mods like this MAY help conversions, but it's a skewed result. More users does not mean more posts, and it drops your post per member ratio.

Any problem with anything shown at the top of the screen is it diverts peoples attentions off the adsense

Back to the thinking board. Would moving the quick register hack to the bottom of forum home and forum display work