Links from support community profiles

[cbielich]

I was answering some questions on the Apple support website because I like to answer questions for people there and I decided to check out my profile. I noticed that at some point I inserted my website in a field they provide called "homepage" then I viewed the source and noticed that it is a "dofollow" link.

So I have decided to start targeting questions that relate to my niche. Can even these links help my rankings? Since my username links to my profile page which has the link to my website?

[cbielich]

Example Page

https://discussions.apple.com/message/21397989#21397989

Yeah I am not seeing anything in Google for these pages, I did a view source and didnt see a "noindex" on the pages

I also did a https://discussions.apple.com/robots.txt and didnt see anything like "Disallow: /messages" anywere

but I am not seeing the user profiles indexed either unless I am missing something

[cbielich]

https://discussions.apple.com/message/21397989#21397989

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I think what he is referring to Gianluca, is a targeted question in his niche going to be beneficial because it is his username that links through to his profile, which is then the part that has the dofollow link.

To the Cesar - do you know if these support pages are crawled and indexed by Google? If they are, and the link from your username is not blocked, then yes, it could be beneficial.

Do you have a link for us to have a look at an example?

Andy

[gfiorelli1]

Every dofollow links matters... also if it is from a profile like the one you have on Apple.

If you think it, it is the same here on Moz: the link to your site in your profile has a value and, as every page, if you "build" links to that profile, it will grow in PA and PR, hence passing more value to your site.

Somehow a great public profile page is beneficial for both the site allowing you to have a profile and you. In fact, if the profile page is very good for the feature it offers, their "owners" will tend linking to it for reference (as I do on my site to my Moz profile, as there it is officially declared my nature as SEOmoz Global Associate), which is a very natural and easy way of earning links for the site. But it is also a great way of adding PA and so passing PR to your site via de dofollow link to it.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

A lot depends on what is being spidered and seen by Google. I might be tempted to go with co-citations and mentions at the end of a post (almost like a signature), as these are also looked at by Google.