Member Pages in Sitemap?

On a forum I run the member names are relevant to my niche, e.g. for Lord of the Rings I have tons of users named "Bilbo" or "Hobbit" or "Sauron" so it's possible that their names and profiles could attract traffic. What's the thought on indexing these pages? It seems that many are not fond of including member pages to the sitemap but it would seem beneficial.

PS - still no social bookmarks.

In general, i suggest not including member profile pages in the sitemap, but do allow them to be accessible for guests. They can/will still be indexed, even if not in the sitemap.

You don't want to give a lot of weight to member pages. If you do include them, make your range .1-.2 at most.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

In general, i suggest not including member profile pages in the sitemap, but do allow them to be accessible for guests. They can/will still be indexed, even if not in the sitemap.

You don't want to give a lot of weight to member pages. If you do include them, make your range .1-.2 at most.

Thanks - forgive me if this is a stupid question: If the pages will be indexed anyways, what's the point in even creating a sitemap? Fact is that after I started using one I've found my site's traffic dropping significantly. No good deed goes unpunished!

A sitemap is merely a 'suggestion of urls to visit'. All pages are interlinked, so when the bot looks at the site map, sees a showthread url, it has links to all the members that posted in that thread already, and so on and continues to spider out from there.

Sitemap VS traffic is usually not a comparable metric. Again, it is a 'suggestion list'. It has nothing to do with ranking, search terms, queries, or anything else that likely have more effect on your traffic.

google wouldn't accept it, and we wouldn't create a mod for it, if it wasn't a helpful item.