For some time now, we have not been able to get our knowledgebases indexed by the major search engines. Due to our membership management system, which restricts access to our subscription areas, anyone or anything (e.g., a search engine-indexing spider) without a login password cannot view the knowledgebase content. That software company tried to provide a programmatic fix, but it has never really worked. With no access to the article pages, the major search engines do not know of all the wonderful content we have available.
As we became increasingly aware of the importance of keywords and search engine placement as part of our site marketing efforts, I finally worked out a solution. Our membership system has a protection method designed specifically for PHP files, which powers our knowledgebases. I finally figured in during one night of tossing and turning over this issue, that I had enough PHP troubleshooting (very different from actually writing code) experience to give the method a go.
I was finally able to make the change work, although there is one hiccup. The first time a registered member visits a newly configured knowledgebase (KB; e.g., Seminary, Primary, Primary Music, Sampler) they will see an obscure error message. This is due to the new handling of the information in their login cookie. If the member hits backup and tries the article link again, they should get a good response. I have not been able to find a solution for this; however, the workaround is easy enough to figure out; Go back, retry.
The result of this change is that non-registered users can traverse the category trees of the KBs mentioned above, where they can view up to 400 characters of the article contents. Previously, they could not even see the KB home page. These same article previews (almost 7000 counting all KBs) should now eventually appear in the major search engines, increasing our visibility and search page ranking accordingly.
