Agreed for sure. That is actually what I tell my clients.

And I myself follow the same practice. I'm very involved on Facebook, increasingly involved on Twitter, and do a little on Flickr.

But the About.me site is a very interesting one. There is very little method to interact with other members as of now, but do see a great opportunity to being on there. I was just wondering for sites like these if there was a better way to get them indexed.

Thanks for the response.

There has been a lot of talk lately around social profiles potentially improving your brand as well as search.

What I'd like to know is the best practices for getting those social profiles crawled and indexed so they actually provide a good link to my site.

I'm also wondering what the difference between what Linkscape sees and what Google sees and when I'm looking at Open Site Explorer's rankings on one of those social profiles how can I be sure that Google sees it the same way.

I ask this because a lot of these profiles are not well internally linked to. An example is about.me, it's a potentially great link, but it's essentially an island, and even after dropping a couple Twitter links to my profile, Open Site Explorer shows and Page Authority of 1, and it's not even indexed with Google.

What I did last night was put a link to my about.me, flickr and wedding wire in my Connect menu drop down on my site to get that crawled hopefully soon.

Are there other methods of getting those crawled and indexed so it starts passing some juice?
What do you guys do?

Both Ryans are spot on. If you are not sure if it is a CSS coded menu or not, I would suggest posting the URL to your site so one of us can tell you.