Google Spider Question

[Rascagua]

I have a forum, and anyone can read the title of the posts, but not the content, unless that person is signed up as a member of the forum.

Is this the same for the Spiders, such as Google, that visit my Forum?
Or can they read the posts anyway.

If they cant read the content of the posts, then: Is there a way to set it so that when its a spider it gives it like an auto pass thing?

[Coolalex]

use your spiders.txt to give google access

[Rascagua]

Could you explain that a little more please?

[POLiSH]

use your spiders.txt to give google access

I have never heard of spiders.txt, but I have heard of robots.txt.

[clasione]

I have a forum, and anyone can read the title of the posts, but not the content, unless that person is signed up as a member of the forum.

Is this the same for the Spiders, such as Google, that visit my Forum?
Or can they read the posts anyway.

If they cant read the content of the posts, then: Is there a way to set it so that when its a spider it gives it like an auto pass thing?

Yes there is a way to do that but I highly recommend that you don't. There has been many discussion about this type of thing and if your forum is running vbulletin software, then you can find many of these discussions and solutions at www.vbulletin.org.

The problem with allowing the spider in and not the general visitor is that search engines, especially Google, will sometimes send unknown spiders to your site to see if it shows the same material to an unknown IP address verses an IP address known to be Google..... What they are doing is checking for cloaking and other attemps to serve seo pages to spiders and a redirect to a user...... You don't want to start getting into serving different pages based on user agent unless you really know what you are doing....

I know of only one site that has successfully done this and it is www.webmasterworld.com - that is the only successful case that I am aware of, but there are others.