Library Music Themes

General Sharing & Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: likedeeler on July 29, 2026, 10:10:25 AM

Title: SUGGESTION >> Reduce search engine visibility of this forum
Post by: likedeeler on July 29, 2026, 10:10:25 AM
redwave recently remarked:

The links on search engines to this forum are extensive and concerning [...]

I'd like to ask the administrators to consider removing LMT from search engines. This may help to bring the number of anonymous guests vs users visiting the site more into balance again. The admin dashboard of the forum software should offer options to do this. Also check out https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing.

What do you think?
Title: Re: SUGGESTION >> Reduce search engine visibility of this forum
Post by: Yohanes Salomo on July 29, 2026, 11:17:53 AM
I had a bad feeling about this, but we'll see. 🤔
Title: Re: SUGGESTION >> Reduce search engine visibility of this forum
Post by: Mr on July 29, 2026, 01:38:29 PM
Thanks for the suggestion, but I honestly don't think that's a great idea - most of our members have stumbled upon this forum through search engines and later joined it, myself included.
We did attempt to gate off the forum once in the past, and it didn't turn out very well.

Anonymous visitors are to be expected when hosting any website, it's not really a problem in itself.
I'll add though, that the web in its entirety is being scraped and crawled at a much higher rate after the LLM/"AI" boom, so I suspect some of our incoming traffic are bots who will never directly interact with the site beyond observation.
Title: Re: SUGGESTION >> Reduce search engine visibility of this forum
Post by: redwave on July 29, 2026, 02:06:01 PM
To clarify, my suggestion was to make the sharing parts of the forum for members only, retaining full access for the rest of the site.

It’s important that the forum is discoverable on search engines, just the less sensitive parts.

Title: Re: SUGGESTION >> Reduce search engine visibility of this forum
Post by: MrDonut2534 on July 29, 2026, 04:03:01 PM
or using /robots.txt instead.

learn more how to use it here: h77p$://www.robotstxt.org/