A way to get Google index public content of an walled garden Elgg site

Hello,

Say I have a walled garden Elgg site. I still want Google to index the pages/content which the authors marked as "public" as the access (secrecy) level.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks.

  • Facebook is definitely not a walled garden, you can create pages/groups/profiles that are completely public.  You only need to log in if you want to comment on something or interact with it in some way, or see content that isn't marked public.  Otherwise you stay there as long as you want looking at public content.  Those decisions are in the hands of the users.

    That's how elgg is by default.

  • facebook seems to behave as walled garden if you try to browse it without logging in (true, if you type facebook.com/blog you see some blogs but it gives the impression that these are official facebook content, rather than ordinary facebook user content). On the other hand, if you know the URL or come to a page from a search engine index, it lets you view the pulic content on that page, showing the behaviour unlike walled garden. I think theirs is a great combination. Best of both worlds. Generating leads via search engines while maintaining the allure of walled garden.

  • So really all you need then is a home-page with only a login form, no activity or links to the rest of the site.

  • Then try the "login_required" plugin. Its having more flexibility than the default walled garden.

  • @Matt Beckett You are obsolutely right. What I must have is a "home-page with only a login form, no activity or links to the rest of the site". Like the walled garden login screen!

  • Coming back to discussion; I checked some web sites at http://community.elgg.org/showcase. Interesting stuff.

    One such web site is www.justairborne.com. It looks like a walled garden site but it is not. Without login you can see some pages but for others you are redirected to the register page. Somehow I do not think it is an open (non-walled garden) site. I think It is a bit like facebook in that way. 

    Anybody has an idea how justairborne.com achieved this?

    Thx.

  • 1 - Add gatekeeper(); on those pages that you don't open for all visitors.

    2 - Use Roles plugin for extending same solutions

  • @Selen: the justairborn site looks like a walled-garden site to me. There only seems some pages being defined as public pages using the 'public_pages', 'walled_garden' plugin hook. If you use the Anypage plugin you can define such public pages quite easily while still keeping your site a walled-garden site. For other more plugin-specific pages you still can define a page as public using the 'public_pages', 'walled_garden' plugin hook. Though you will need to modify these plugins by adding this plugin hook. Still, this seems much easier to be done to me than doing it the other way round by disabling the walled garden option and restrict the access via gatekeeper() of all pages you don't want to be visible while logged out.