SEO

Hello,

is it better to disable signatures and avatars for guests and search engines? Is there any advantage?

Personally I dont like the idea of disabling sigs for guests/search engines. People make posts and as part payment for them doing so, I consider it is only fair that they are able to link with their sigs.

Avatars? Google can spider the avatars for Google images, personally, like signatures, I consider avatars add real personality to a forum and i want it to be attactive to guests. I want guest to become members, and dulling down the experience is not the best marketing IMO.

On an SEO perspective, links in sigs do reduce the amount of PR that is available to be recirculated. But until vb3.5 there have been heaps of links that should have been deleted. With 3.5 most navigation/user style links have been rel=nofollowed. So with the realively small number of sign links, and less page links, I consider that a forum would get more users, therefore more potential inbounds, with allowing sig links - a trade off.