punbb getting spidered and indexed

yeah, but every thread also has links to the forum the post is on, and the index forum

I would like to add "ref=nofollow" (recent anti blog spam addition by the major search engines) to the profile links I think...is there an easy way to do this? What file would I have to edit?

Interesting. Actually, it's "noindex, follow", not nofollow. The plan behind the meta tag was to prevent spiders to index e.g. post.php and the like. The profile view (when you're looking at someone elses profile and don't have rights to edit it) does not have the noindex meta tag because I thought indexing that view made sense. Searching for someone's username would return a hit pointing to his/her profile. Maybe it doesn't make sense. Maybe adding the meta tag to the userlist also makes more sense. I'm not an expert on search engine indexing.

Removing it from the user list is very easy, just remove the line define('PUN_ALLOW_INDEX', 1); from the script.

right, I have done that...and I think it should be considered for the future changes to the script too. There has to be some reason why user profile pages are being indexed so much easier than other pages, all other things being equal.

The number of results is not an accurate way of determining what Google index more than what.