Why are the forums hidden from Google?

[Tim Curtis]

Moode forum and website do show up in the search results, but it seems it can't read or don't want to read the contents.


it shows a "Learn why" help thing, and if you're owner of the website it says that there's something not configured correctly in your robots.txt.
That points here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7489871


Truth is that your robots.txt seems fine... there's something google doesn't like about the site. 
You are missing a sitemap for example.
Don't know if mybb now does it with or without additional extensions.
IIRC there was a google seo plugin for mybb to automate these things.
But you should have a sitemap in your robots.txt like this:

Code:

Sitemap: https://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap/
Sitemap: https://www.mywebsite.com/forum/sitemap-index.xml

and once it's accessible submit it through google webmaster tools and it'll index correctly the contents.
also give a look at what's showing up in google's Search Console, if it says something there.
SEO can be a pain, but this shouldn't be too hard.

Albeit I am trying to degoogle completely (as IMHO "Google is evil" and too powerful, personal thing), it still would be useful if the forum showed up correctly in the results instead of "No information is available for this page".
The issue is that diyaudio outranks this when you search something about moode and people are getting sent to that hundred pages long diyaudio thread (a mess).

Good info.

I tried generating a sitemap using one of the online tools but there were > 500 pages to crawl and that requires a fee. If someone can get a full sitemap.xml file of http://moodeaudio.org I'll do the Google admin to make it active.

But what about bing, duckduckgo, etc search engines?

Btw, if I enter the OP's example search string in various engines the top hit is this thread...