Hey Staff, Just wondering why you let the entire forum get indexed by search engines when the in-forum search engine is already functional enough to provide search services. I think that the main page and announcements should be more than enough to have search engines index. Otherwise, why distribute cache copies of all our posts here across the internet? Additionally, why have constant network load from web crawlers on the website? (Sometimes there are 15+ sessions) Another thing, I really think that unregistered users and web crawlers should not have access to the Current Visitors page as not only does it display who's online, but what page they viewed last. It can potentially be a privacy concern for those that do not have showing their recent activity disabled. http://royals.ms/forum/online/?type=robot -Oldie
Search bots is good - it make sure searching "mapleroyals" ends up in high results, or even "maplestory v62 private server" EDIT: Searching "Maplestory v62 private server" actually shows Royals as first, so yeah.
Assuming they have both enabled in their privacy settings, yes; since our update to the latest version of XenForo these are separate settings. I agree with the latter point in any case and have disabled these things for unregistered guests. As to the issue of crawlers: this isn't my decision, I would have to defer to someone else. I wouldn't object to a much stricter robots.txt personally. Having said that, the load from our webserver is negligible compared to the game server; the robots don't make much of a difference.
Indexing the forums does not seem to help in this case. There are no forum links. yandex + bing Spoiler google Spoiler
You may be surprised at the amount of traffic the forum gets when people search for general MapleStory information: etc... Sf you want forum links to show up in search results then you need to be searching for something which has been posted on the forum. For example: "maplestory htpq quest": or "maplestory v62 guide":
It's only google that shows mapleroyals links so often. it really is to your advantage then, as long as google continues to show links to mapleroyals and being a top search provider. Bing and Yandex however, don't display links to the forums. Perhaps not at all or at much smaller amounts.
