Congratulations to the local boys from Beaumaris for snagging one of the oldest domain forums, domainstate.com, today
Price was in excess of $46k

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Joes.com.au

Well done, I was interested in going for it, but knew the competition would be fierce. Think of all those pages that can be indexed by google now, I really didn't understand why they had banned all search engines from crawling the site.

I also thought they were an old version of phpBB, then saw Powered by: vBulletin down the bottom and wondered how old the version was haha.

Good news for Safe and the other admins....

Hope Above.com look after the site.... a great community there!

Cheers
Chumby

**I really didn't understand why they had banned all search engines from crawling the site.**

Search engine indexing was banned because of the sensitive information that was often posted by members at DS .. ie: trade mark name discussions, outcomes and opions of UDRP discussions ect .. even notable attorneys have commented at DS about the outcome or pending UDRP cases with free advice which in retrospect (now that DS will probably be opened up to SE) they maybe shouldn't have ..

DS was almost a closed shop for professionals where you could say almost anything without it being broadcast to the World ...

I think that it's a bad thing that DS will probaby be open to SE by the new owners ... There are plenty of other forums around for SE exposure ... thats one reason why private forums are popular with the pro's ...

Thanks for the info, Joe. Good to see an local company taking over. Another example of Aussies batting above their weight in the domain industry

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CocktailRecipes.com.au ★ Photographers.com.au ★ DebitCard.com.au ★ Hockey.com.au ★ Boxing.com.au ★ DomainName.com.au

Nice to hear that and i m sure above.com will increase its credibility and reputation

:-)

how do you BAN search engines on a site?

Thanks

Using robots file and/or robots meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> tag.

Another way is by requiring you to have an account to view the forums.

Looking at domainstate they went with the robots option.

thanks mate.....if you go the robot option, must be on each page obviously and not just the index/home, right?

Yeah if it is just the robots meta tag, then every page you want to block.
But if you use a robots.txt then just the once, but you need to list the individual pages, directories you want to block.
Simplest (and surest) way to block a forum from spiders is to require login to read the forums.