Does google spider forums?

I just did a quick search on Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bthe+s ... 8&oe=utf-8

and it sure showed up all of (or nearly all of) Ozzu's threads.

Willy email me your forum I'll take a look as long as it doesnt promote SEO or Kiddy porn I'll do the mod for free

nice offer guy

Yea i found my posts on google via ozzu lolololol....and i put in google some other word!

Suzie.

My hack was huge for my board. Initially I wasn't getting spidered at all, but about a week after the hack was installed I was getting spidered like crazy and indexed. I'd recommend it.

yeah, google spiders my forums pretty well -> linky

That's cool, I always thought forums were excluded. I guess it depends on whether the pages are static or not, or use of sitemaps etc?

BD

If a browser can view the page there is little reason a spider bot wouldn't be able to.
They may spider dynamic content a little slower that static pages, But this is because dynamic content put's more of a load on the server and the last thing google want to be known for is lagging peoples server.

Google has indexed 618,000 pages from phpbb.com, And they have the standard forum runninig as thier support forum (no mod_rewrite) with variiables in URL's and sessions.

If Google spiders forums...then is it possible for forums to rank high on target keywords (without actually typing 'forum' in your search string)?

Of course. Forums turn up all the time on search results, If google thinks that page can give you the best result for your search.

Like if you were to search for some phpbb related problem, It is likely that the phpbb support forum will be high in those results.

seo for web forums and mostly search engine friendly urls are very important issues...

No it's not. Google has no problem spidering dynamic pages.

edit: Why do you keep posting warez links in every post, Is it to get around ozzus signature rules? You do know the forum has "nofollow" attributes on links, don't you?

Can Google still crawl your forums if it's set that only registered users can see and post? Does Google get past that, or do I need to change it so that it's visible to everyone?

How would google get passed it? And even if they could get passed it why would they want to? Google wouldn't want to send searchers to login pages.

If an unregistered users can't see it then neither can google.
If you want all of your pages to be spidered and indexed you will have to let google spider and index them.

Yes, it defiatelly spider forums. Even better then other websites. I have a forum site http://www.tradenec.com. It is an old forum. Even the information on the forum is very old. It is a useless website. It has a pagerank 4 and 809 pages are spidered by google. Which means all pages are indexed. Near this, i have a game website. http://www.zopcuk.eu It is very nice designed and has a daily updated content. It is pagerank 0 and has 165 pages indexed. Which means about half of the website indexed.