Thoughts about this vbulletin hack

**Mike** · 08-13-2006 07:53 PM

Hide Links From Guests - vBulletin.org Forum

I am thinking about installing this on my boards. As posted on another thread here in regards to getting visitors to register, this would work somewhat like the vbulletin option to disallow the viewing of attachements, only this would be for viewing links in the threads.

What does everyone think of this hack?

**Juan Muriente** · 08-13-2006 07:58 PM

Looks good, but then you would be disallowing spiders from following that content too.

**rmjvol** · 08-14-2006 10:50 AM

My intial reaction is that it would undermine your seo efforts if not implemented very carefully. You'd also greatly reduce the chance of successfully capitalizing on trackbacks/pingbacks.

That being said, some pieces of it might be useful if you can implement just those parts.

Good luck, Ross

**briansol** · 08-14-2006 12:31 PM

Looks like cloaking to me...

**Mike** · 08-14-2006 01:07 PM

Originally Posted by briansol

Looks like cloaking to me...

I dont like that word "cloaking" at all. It scares me.

That said, what make you think of this as cloaking? Or I guess a better way to ask this would be...

Do you think blocking the viewing of attachements to guests is "cloaking"? Seems like the same exact thing to me.

**briansol** · 08-14-2006 01:18 PM

Quality guidelines - basic principles

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

While you are showing it to "guests" as well, i still think its borderline.

same thing for attachments. mine are open.

Whats the point?

make someone register to see a picture? why? so you have 23433242 members with 0 posts?
if they want to be a member, they will sign up. plain and simple.
making them sign up to see stuff won't help.

**Keith Cohen** · 08-14-2006 01:22 PM

I block attachments for guests also. Did it many years ago. Resulted in a HUGE drop in bandwidth usage.

**rmjvol** · 08-15-2006 11:27 AM

This isn't cloaking. You're serving the exact same thing to spiders that you're serving to any surfer that hits your site and doesn't login.

That's like saying any subscription based site is cloaking because paying members get to see/do stuff that spiders/non-paying visitors don't get.

A cloaking penalty is not the concern with this hack. My concern (besides the pingback/trackback thing) is that you're not looking like a natural website (and especially not a natural forum) if you've got no outbound links. You miss the opportunity to get improved scoring based upon where you link and how you link to other sites.

If you've got a thread about Brett Favre's retirement, some factors that might help you rank higher include:

keywords in your title
keywords in anchor text pointing at the page
incoming links from Packers themed sites
outgoing links to Packers (or Favre retirement) themed site/page
the anchor text you use to link to an external site
million other things...

The point is, one thing probably isn't going to make or break you but using optimized external links can help you in some situations. And not just with Google.

So I woundn't suggest a wholesale removal of all external links from all your threads/posts.

Good luck,
Ross

**rob** · 08-16-2006 06:55 AM

Nothing you show to guests, or hide could ever be considered cloaking.

Registration or membership opens up new features and functionality...

The site could be a radically different one with heaps and heaps of extra info once logged in.... the fact you get different when logged out is just realism.... nothing to do with cloaking

Cloaking would be showing different content to robots as you would general guests (not logged in)

Thoughts about this vbulletin hack

Thoughts about this vbulletin hack

Similar Threads

vBulletin 3.6 Release Candidate 1 Available

vBulletin 3.6 Beta 2 Released