Member Profiles and Show Post.. is it something we should want indexed?

**libertylounge** · 09-10-2006 07:26 PM

Does number of pages indexed really matter so much when compared to quality content being indexed?

Lately, although we've seen an increase in pages indexed, many of them are member profiles which don't really tell anyone about our site, and I don't know that it does much to help our page.

Maybe someone can tell me otherwise?

showpost seems like it'd be duplicate content if they're reading the threads anyway, wouldn't it?

I'd like people to find our threads so they can see the thread content, individual posts can be idiotic or not really tell much about the threads content, so it almost seems like it'd be better to deny robots access to those so they're looking at the entirety of the thread

I know briansol said something about it in one of his posts, but I haven't had a chance to talk to him about it.

So, thoughts?

Should I add /members/ or member.php to robots.txt? Or showpost?

**nevetS** · 09-10-2006 09:40 PM

Personally, I've gone back and forth on the idea of individual posts. I like the idea of a smart rel="nofollow" for posts where if the post length is longer than a certain amount of characters, it is shown to the SE's. Some posts are great content in and of themselves, and the thread responses can sometimes go off on tangents and turn irrelevant.

On the other hand, it is essentially duplicate content if you also have the thread indexed. It's a difficult scenario to figure out.

As far as the member profiles go, it's probably a matter of whether or not your member profiles are unique enough - if nobody makes any real changes to their profiles, and they just get the default page with a link to their site and essentially duplicate data for the rest of the page - then it's probably not a bad idea to hide those pages, but wouldn't it be a better proposition to incentivise the community to put together good profile data? It builds out your forum and can provide an opportunity for people to get to know eachother better.

**libertylounge** · 09-10-2006 10:04 PM

It's hard enough to get them to post, spending a lot of time on their member profiles isn't something I really see happening.. at least enough to make the content worth indexing

I already turned down the 'priority' of member profiles because unfortunately, profiles were being indexed as having a higher value than threads, and that's definitely not what I want.

**Keith Cohen** · 09-10-2006 10:08 PM

I have a lot of profile fields where members can choose the name brand(s) of all their equipment to help get some good keywords in there.

I'm currenlty indexing posts too, but I changed the showpost template a bit to make it work a little better as a stand-alone page.

**BamaStangGuy** · 09-10-2006 11:34 PM

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

I have a lot of profile fields where members can choose the name brand(s) of all their equipment to help get some good keywords in there.

I'm currenlty indexing posts too, but I changed the showpost template a bit to make it work a little better as a stand-alone page.

Do you have an example showpost page we can look at to see what you did?

**Keith Cohen** · 09-11-2006 08:59 AM

I did very little actually.

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