TetraBB.com Home of Tetra-WebBBS and TetraBB PRO

Search engines are a major topic these days for everybody running a website. No doubt. Unfortunately most people only see the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aspect. In fact there are a couple of other topics related to search engines. Fortunately Tetra-WebBBs provides means to deal with all of them.

As a general rule of thumb Tetra-WebBBS autosenses for search engines accessing the forums.
Basically searchengines will see the forums just like any human visitor does, according to the guidelines of some major searchengines.
However Tetra-WebBBS reconfigures itself for load optimized presentation of forum pages and disables those features, which are unnecessary for non-human visitors or may cause unnecessary load on the server.

As always with this software there are several optional details to trim your forums to your site's specific needs.
Here are some starting points for you to dig deaper into the major topic of search engines:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Starting with Tetra WebBBS version 6.10 a new set of configuration variables is available to control public URLs pointing to message display pages.
Site owners may trim the appearance of URLs in various ways according to their own preferences of SEO URLs.
To learn more about these options please read the post titled "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)".

Protecting private data from indexing
Always keep in mind that searchengines will index everything on a page and will probably cache your pages.
To learn more about his topic please read "Search engines and your site's privacy policy".

Serverload caused by spiders
To state right front: whenever we analyzed access logfiles of an overloaded server where the host blamed the software, it was "always" rapid fire by searchengines hitting a poorly configured server for which the host sold "unlimited ... blablabla".
For more information read the docs on "Search engines and serverload".

Last not least
If you're curious to check out the search engines view, add the following line to section (1) of a public entry script:

$ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} = 'googlebot';