Removing User profile after SEO?

[Peter77]

In our robots.txt we have disallowed profile.php for search engine optimization reasons. what about after installing SEO MOD... should we also block out the member46.html URL's? or is it 'ok' for search engines to browse member profiles after the SEO optimization?

[dcz]

Well, member profile is a minor SEO issue and a greater security and spam one.

SEO :
I personally dislike to put to much weight on page that do not have a real Interesting Search-able content. It is true some member do like to be Search-able by their profile, but for sure profile cannot be treated as important as topic while Search Engine Optimizing.

That's why I did not inject the member's names in URL (also because many members love nicks like this : "teh~~\_-Of"). I mod rewritten them in order to offer an comfortable user experience, but I did not have in mind those where to be optimized to death.

here come the second matter :

Security and Spam :
those two goes together, because an easy to spam web site is an vulnerable web site, worth a try for script kiddies, almost like a universal target.

First thing one can do to prevent spam, and I will offer many anti spam solution here as well in the future, is running a site not being a honey pot.

Member's profile and user list are the phpBB targets for spammers, because it is very easy to automate the spamming process, no need to post anything to obtain two back-links, so when you add the fact that the registration process can be automated by spammers ...

So IMHO, those should only be viewable by users, this will make you save some server resources, concentrate your Page-Ranking (PR) on the important content and you will not be that attractive to spammers.

So to make sure you tell bots not to take those links into account as well, you can add :

[sceltic]

IF!

it was desirable! how difficult would it be to inject names into members profile instead of static 'member1.html' etc..

[dcz]

[Peter77]

Awesome, thanks for the info dcz. I personally like the way it is -- showing member id number.