Are forums indexed by search engines?
We recommend that anyone using the Internet assume that anything they post online will be viewable by all people for the rest of time. That said, unless we have missed something, in order for a search engine to index content posted to a private forum, it would either have to be logged in as one of the group’s members, or otherwise bypass the authentication procedure. So it is relatively unlikely that content posted to private forums will be indexed by search engines.
