Hide attachements for unregistered users

[shining]

To hide the attachements in Forum (and User Profile > Postet Photos Albums) I use this CSS-Code

.logged-out .OLD__post-content-text .bbcode-attachment {display: none !important;}

Just add this to your css_additional template ...

This also prevents Google & Co from indexing the attachement media.

[glennrocksvb]

This also prevents Google & Co from indexing the attachement media.

No. Search engines can still index the hidden content on the page.

[shining]

They can, but they normally ignore things that have the display=none... because they only want to show "good" content to their users. So it does not make sense for them to link to a picture that can´t be seen.

[glennrocksvb]

Sometimes hiding content may be treated by Google as deceptive depending on what the content is and how it is hidden.

https://support.google.com/webmaster...er/66353?hl=en

But in your case, I don't think Google will think it's bad.

[shining]

Yes I know that, Google reacted years ago to the fact that a lot of "clever" Webmasters and "SEOs" used invisible text and links. You would get this penalty when you would use image and set width to 0px or opacity to 0 so no user can see it.

And thats the difference with display=none and its absolutely okay to use it because you display the images neither to Google nor to the visitor. Thats what its for.
You could make it even better by adding rel="noindex" to the image like:

<img src="example.jpg"  rel="noindex">

But that again would need some coding And its not really necessary because display none nearly tells Google the same.

Here in Germany we have very very strong law because of copyrights of images. So when you allow your users attach images, and they are not the owner of the image...then it might happen to you that you as the forum owner will have to pay a high fine. Thats why I am also interested in that none of any images ever end up in google image search.

[glennrocksvb]

You could still get penalty from Google using display none if what you're hiding are keywords to make your site rank better in search engines.

[shining]

Its a bit better explained here: https://youtu.be/tFSI4cpJX-I?t=10m55s

Not active Tabs and else are usually hidden with display none thats why you should always consider where to use it and which content is important for you to be indexed.
This is also important for drop down menus. The links to most important pages should always be visible.