Forum Signatures bad for SEO?

[Jeffin]

Are forum signatures bad from SEO point of view. Do you allow them to be seen by guests?

 

[Adam Howard]

Are forum signatures bad from SEO point of view. Do you allow them to be seen by guests?

Removing them from public view does reduce your valid content -vs- noise ratio. And of course it helps that you have less duplicate content (as a signature could repeat hundreds of times).

XenForo has a default option to allow you to hide sigs from guest view.

In addition, there is even an add-on that limits sigs to only 1x per thread (per user)
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/signature-once.179/

In my opinion it does help not to display sigs publicly (or excessively). Not just for SEO, but as a spam deterrent

 

[Jeffin]

Removing them from public view does reduce your valid content -vs- noise ratio. And of course it helps that you have less duplicate content (as a signature could repeat hundreds of times).

XenForo has a default option to allow you to hide sigs from guest view.

In addition, there is even an add-on that limits sigs to only 1x per thread (per user)
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/signature-once.179/

In my opinion it does help not to display sigs publicly (or excessively). Not just for SEO, but as a spam deterrent

Hi Adam, thank you for your reply.

Hiding sigs could deter spam? I thought of the exact same thing too. I mean if spammers could see that we allow signature link promotions they would want to target our site even more.

I've allowed guests to see signatures because there is one member on my forum who relies on signature to index all his posts. If the benefits for hiding signatures were so compelling then I'll disable it but he will not be happy with that.

It's this video below by Matt Cutts which made me think about forum signatures.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[digitalpoint]

Hiding signatures for guests does have some SEO value actually because of how PageRank works. Every nofollow link that the search engine spider sees, the less PageRank you have flowing to your normal links (nofollow links more or less devalue the worth of "dofollow" links on the same page).

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

On my site, the only signatures that show to guests are the signatures of premium members (they are still nofollow of course).

 

[Carlos]

It may be good for SEO, but how can you attract new users or repeat users? People like graphics, people like eye candy.

 

[digitalpoint]

It may be good for SEO, but how can you attract new users or repeat users? People like graphics, people like eye candy.

When was the list time you didn't use a forum that you would have used if it had better looking signatures?

 

[Carlos]

When was the list time you didn't use a forum that you would have used if it had better looking signatures?

It's not me. It's other people - take a look at comparing between here and here.

To me, the second one is more bland than the first one.

 

[digitalpoint]

It's not me. It's other people - take a look at comparing between here and here.

To me, the second one is more bland than the first one.

It's just a matter of opinion I guess... Second one would be the one I would want to use between the two.