A few questions....

I have a VB 3.5 site which uses the CMPS index for the homepage. The VB files are in /forum off the root. The index file is index.php.

I currently have a robots.txt which is blocking everything. I am thinking about opening this up a little and adding the SEO system. I currently have 1000+ members and 65k posts. The site has been online for 4 years now, but was running UBB until this past May.

Here are my questions:

How secure is VB from SPAM bots and email harvesters? What will happen when I open up the robots.txt to allow everyone in?

What do I need to do to keep user information private? I want to index the posts and my site (including some non-forum material) but do not want to reveal personal information or have my user's profiles showing up on Google.

Will this also index posts that are in a GARS system?

Are there any recommendations you can make for a new site to make sure things don't get out of hand with the information that will be available?

Will Google and Yahoo start to point to my /forum for the root website?

How does SEO relate to the dynamic content as well as CMPS? Is this really just designed for creating static indices of dynamic pages?

How can I ensure a minimum of deep linking?

Thank you very much for answering my numerous questions.

How secure is vBulletin from SPAM bots and email harvesters? What will happen when I open up the robots.txt to allow everyone in?

vB has it's own inbuilt image authentication system which stop spam bots from registering and things like that. You'll need to turn this on in your vbulletin options in your admincp.

As for email harvesting.. there's a plugin on vbulletin.org that will turn all emails posted into images dynamically. I'm using it on alanwake.net and it works like a treat.

What do I need to do to keep user information private? I want to index the posts and my site (including some non-forum material) but do not want to reveal personal information or have my user's profiles showing up on Google.

You can set it within vbulletin so that guests can't view user profiles.

Will this also index posts that are in a GARS system?

GARS rewriting is built in to vBSEO, so yes.

Are there any recommendations you can make for a new site to make sure things don't get out of hand with the information that will be available?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by get out of hand.

Will Google and Yahoo start to point to my /forum for the root website?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this either.

How does SEO relate to the dynamic content as well as CMPS? Is this really just designed for creating static indices of dynamic pages?

No it's all still dynamic, it just tricking outside visitors into thinking it's static.

How can I ensure a minimum of deep linking?

Not quite sure of this either.

Thanks for the answers. I figured out the other questions and I probably just phrased it wrong as I don't fully understand the product.