Content in forum signatures being spidered, does it matter?

[rutteger]

Hello,

first post here, just started with SEOmoz so hope it's relevant. Searched a fair bit on this without getting a good answer either way so interested to get some opinions.

The core of the site I run is a forum dedicated to collecting, for the sake of argument let's say cars. A good percentage of the users have signatures which list their collection, for example

1968 Car A - 1987 Car B - 1998 Car D and so on....

These signatures lists can be 20 items or more, some hotlink the signautres back to the relevant post on the forum, some not. The signatures show on every post on which the user makes.

What I'm noting is

a) SEOMoz is reporting a LOT of links on every forum page, due mainly to these signatures I guess.

and of more interest

b) The content of the signatures is being spidered. So for example of you search for '1968 Car A' you might get a couple of good results directly relevant to '1968 Car A' from my site, but you also get a lot of other non-relevant threads as results because the user just happens to have posted on them. Obviously this is much more apparent on the site google search.

So what is the best approach?

Leave as is? Hide the signatures from the BOTs? Another approach?

[rutteger]

On reflection I've taken the suggested approach of using the nocontent tags for CSE and ensured all signature links are nofollow.

Once again ensured bots can see the signatures due to slight concern about cloaking penalty.

Thanks for your feedback.

[Everett]

Rutteger,

If that forum template really removes signatures ONLY for bots, then yes that is cloaking. I wouldn't do that.

The info above was for solving the internal site search problem only, not for Google web search.

However, the additional tips I provided should help with web search. Other than that I wouldn't be too terribly worried about it.

[rutteger]

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Although not 100% clear I'm assuming this only applies to custom search rather than google proper?

Never put much time into SEO over the years, always hoped google would figure stuff out. Signature content is defintely being indexed.

For the moment taken the approach of one of the 'SEO' forum templates of not showing signatures to the BOTs. Will see how it goes. Bit reluctant to do this because slightly worried it might be seen as cloaking but hope it'll work out long term...

[Everett]

Hello Rutteger,

Regarding SiteSearch, this is from Google Support:

Exclude boilerplate content

"If your pages have regions containing boilerplate content that's not relevant to the main content of the page, you can identify it using the nocontent class attribute. When Google Custom Search sees this tag, we'll ignore any keywords it contains and won't take them into account when calculating ranking for your Custom Search engine... To use the nocontent class attribute, you'll need to tag the boilerplate content, and then modify your context file. This tells Google that you're using the nocontent class attribute."

Read the rest here:
http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2631036

I think it is a great idea for you to have members use that field to showcase their collections in this way. It keeps the signature content relevant (at least at the forum level, if not for the thread) and increases internal linking.

Additionally, I would do the following:

• Limit signature privileges to members with a certain number of posts and/or other metrics (e.g. Kudos, points...)
• Do not allow external linking from forum signatures

I will leave this question open as a discussion in case anyone else has first-hand experience with traffic / ranking changes before and after removing signatures from a forum - or with handling the situation in some other way.

Lastly, Google is pretty good at recognizing boilerplate content. They have been dealing with forum signatures for years, and since the area is highly-prone to spam I would imagine they know what the signatures are on most major forum platforms. Thus, I wouldn't fret over it too much unless it is clearly causing you problems in the SERPs.

Good luck!