Google?

[Yvonne]

My husband has just taken great delight in showing me that a post to
The forum is available through a search on Google!
I am concerned, as this would not be my choice!!!!! Help! how can we post without appearing on Google?

[Dave A]

Post anything you don't want available on Search Engines in the Members area.

[duncan drennan]

Just to expand on what Dave is saying....

Dave has set up really excellent SEO (search engine optimisation) on The Forum, so all the search engines regularly crawl the site, and The Forum gets really good results on the search engines (go Dave!). The major advantage of this is that everyone that posts to this forum gets free web search optimisation!

To make use of that free optimisation all you need to do is add a signature to your user profile (I'll detail this shortly in the "Getting Started" thread). It is a huge advantage for you, and your business. Also, if you provide useful content (such as information about your industry) this will also get picked up.

The drawback to this is that you shouldn't post anything that you want to keep (relatively) private in the open part of The Forum SA. Dave in his wisdom thought about this and setup the "Registered Members Area" which is only accessible by registered members.

The members area is not indexed by search engines, and is therefore "private" in that it won't be broadcast over the web. All the information there is accessible to all members though, and anyone can register on The Forum SA for free. Basically any real person could get to the info if they wanted to, but web crawlers and bots are not able to reach it.

If there is a special circumstance and you have something uber–private that you would like to discuss with only a certain group of people, then contact Admin, and they'll see what can be organised for your specific case. One of the things that this could be useful for is holding a company meeting (such as an AGM) where only certain members (such as your shareholders) are allowed to access the content. When the new companies bill is passed that type of setup could be quite useful.

Hope that explains it all!

[Dave A]

If there is a special circumstance and you have something uber–private that you would like to discuss with only a certain group of people, then contact Admin, and they'll see what can be organised for your specific case.

And whether these areas do or do not already exist here is anyone's guess