making these forums google-crawlable

[bryface]

so i was googling the other day to see if something like a bryface.com domain exists, and i discovered that conversations on this forum show up in google's search results.

i was wondering, do you guys care about this? personally i don't care either way, but i understand if there are others who aren't comfortable with having these threads crawlable by the google search bots.

on the other hand, this might actually be what you want. on the clay fellowship blog, we've actually made it a policy to have all entries crawlable, in the interest of transparency and so that we don't close off opportunities for discussion/outreach/fellowship with passers-by.

anyway just checking.

[nature boy]

i thought this came up already and many of the forums need permissions to enter (the xp men/ladies, moms/dads forums, gordon's uber stealth stag crew) so we needn't worry about it?

going somewhat off topic, is there a way to make a certain site (for example, a church website) to be higher on the google search list? i know i heard that companies were able to do that by paying more or something for a better position on the hit list, but i don't know who to pay or talk to for this to happen.

[bryface]

i think the private forums are home-safe, but the public forums are still crawlable. of course, this is all moot if you guys don't care about your posts being subjected to scrutiny without your knowledge.

and to answer your second question nat, the answer is yes. In fact there are entire companies that do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for other clients who want a higher listing on search results. At my company we have SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Specialists who make sure a given site is optimized so that it gets whatever position it deserves in search engines.

The thing is that there are "proper" ways to do it, and also some "douchey, underhanded" ways to do it. Google's engineers spend a lot of time fine-tuning the search engine so that it's smart enough to detect if a site is doing it unfairly and thus punish the behaviour by pushing the site further down the list of results.

[nature boy]

how would i find the proper ways of doing it then?

[bryface]

[nature boy]

i'll check it out, thanks.