Prevent Caching

[Millar]

I have a forum and I want to allow spiders to view everything a registered member can so it will include it in search results, but I want to make it so users can't just view the topic via Google's cache, therefore meaning they don't have to register to see the content. What should I do to prevent Google from making a cache of my pages?

 

[antman]

Through my experience with forums and Google, Google will not cache anything behind any page that only a visitor can see. Anything that requires a member to register won't be able to be picked up by Google.

However, with one of my forums, a post that I posted appeared in Google results, but after clicking a link, it went to the 'You need to register to see the thread' page. Best to create a thread with keywords that can be picked up by a search engine, and allowing visitors to sign up to see the rest...

 

[Millar]

Well, I have set it in my Admin CP so that my forum treats Forum Spiders as Members, so that means they can see all posts registered members can. So thats not a problem, I just want to stop caching. So you can't view a cache of the topic.

 

[death001]

google can answer this
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35306

 

[amosba]

I have a forum and I want to allow spiders to view everything a registered member can so it will include it in search results, but I want to make it so users can't just view the topic via Google's cache, therefore meaning they don't have to register to see the content. What should I do to prevent Google from making a cache of my pages?

Few things frustrate me more than sites that do this. I absolutely detest it when I serach for something in Google, can see a snippet of the information that I am after in the search results, then have to register at the site to view the content. If you make it searchable, make it visible. I instantly click the back button when I come across sites that do this, and most people I know do the same.

Also, it is possible that this could get you banned from Google - they don't like sites presenting one page to their spider and a different one to regular users.

If you want more people to register, make your content more compelling, but if you want people to find your content, make your content visible to them. Make me register to post by all means, but give me a reason to register and not a reason to find another site with the information I am after.

 

[Redleg]

Also, it is possible that this could get you banned from Google - they don't like sites presenting one page to their spider and a different one to regular users.

That's correct.
It's called cloaking and it's a big no-no to show different content to spiders than to visitors.
It's one of the "better" ways of getting kicked out of SEs..

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
......
If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index.

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

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users' browser; this is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of whatever is requesting the page. The only legitimate uses for cloaking used to be for delivering content to users that search engines couldn't parse, like Macromedia Flash. However, cloaking is often used as a spamdexing technique, to try to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking; it can also be used to trick search engine users into visiting a site based on the search engine description which site turns out to have substantially different - or even pornographic - content. For this reason some search engines threaten to ban sites using cloaking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking

Just a friendly warning,...

 

[Millar]

Hmm, maybe I won't do this afterall, thanks for the help guys!

 

[squatter]

Few things frustrate me more than sites that do this. I absolutely detest it when I serach for something in Google, can see a snippet of the information that I am after in the search results, then have to register at the site to view the content.

Absolutely! IBut anyway, not many forum-qwners do this, as I find tons of important info on SEO in forums, there are so many opf them, and the important you can do this without registration.
Millar, thanx for your decision.