XF 1.4 SEO And Members page

[Biarritz64]

Hi

In 1.4 we can add members page in our sitemap

My question is:

Is it good for SEO to let search engine crawl members page?

For now, i block the members page in my robots.txt

Someone have any experience?

Should i let search engine crawl members page?

Hope you understand my English ;-)

Thank you

 

[Paul B]

It's your choice.

SEO doesn't really enter into it.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Should i let search engine crawl members page?

Do you mean each member's profile page? Or the list of members, e.g. https://xenforo.com/community/members/

If you mean each individual member's profile, then unless they are famous and searched for a lot, then many people would say those are thin content pages and best to have disallowed since Panda may possibly penalise thin content.

I can't see any harm in disallowing, since people aren't likely to do searches and end up on finding your site due to finding either your member list or a member profile in SERPS.

 

[cmeinck]

I wouldn't block members pages if they are indexed. You need to decide if you want them indexed or not. If that's a no, I'd put a no-index, follow tag on your member pages. Once removed from Google, I'd update your robots.txt. If you update robots.txt before removing them, you'll have a ton of pages in the index with a description "Blocked by robots.txt".

Blocking does not remove from the index. The proper method is the remove and then block.

 

[Biarritz64]

@Mr Lucky , yes i mean each member's profile page

thank you for your answers

 

[Markos]

No, it's not good to let google bot index single members page. Also i think that it would be better to remove indexing for welcome forums and areas of "low quality" content.