Content in forum signatures being spidered, does it matter?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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...
-
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 thenocontent
class attribute, you'll need to tag the boilerplate content, and then modify your context file. This tells Google that you're using thenocontent
class attribute."Read the rest here:
http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2631036I 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!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to deal with this duplicate content
Hello our websites offers prayer times in the US and UK. The problem is that we have nearby towns where the prayer times are the same and the pages (exp : https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-michigan-12258-en and https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-12147-en) are in duplicate . Same issue for this page https://prayer-time.uk/prayer-times-wallsend-411-en How can we solve this problem
On-Page Optimization | | Zakirou0 -
Question about creating content pages for keywords
Good morning, We are trying to rank our India based company which provides the following services
On-Page Optimization | | harshal.khatavkar
Engineering Design Services
Architectural Design Services
MEP Design Services Our target audiences are in the US and UK. Offcource, we are targetting above services keywords on most of our main pages and created dedicated services pages too. But lately, we found out that we are ranking well for keywords like Outsourcing Engineering Design Services, Outsourcing Architectural Design Services, etc... which are actually very very good keywords in terms of closing the leads/inquiries as people are actually looking out for outsourcing but the search count for those keywords is low. (though we closed 2 inquiries from those keywords). These pages we created in past just to increase the content of the website. I really want to give it a try to target those keywords by creating more pages, blog posts, backlinks, etc... My question is if we create more and more pages around those keywords then will it affect the rankings of the pages which are already ranking for those keywords or will the new pages compete against those pages or the new pages will help to boost current pages? We can write good content and blog posts on the outsourcing topic but not sure if we should create new pages or increase the length of the existing pages. Can you guys please help with some directions on this as I really don't want to take the wrong route. Look forward! Regards0 -
Is minor duplicate content on my website okay?
I know duplicate content across multiple websites is not a good thing, however I've always wondered about minor duplicate content on your own website. I know its good practice to have unique content on each page but what about the little stuff. For example on our website certain related pages share the same content in a right sidebar. Such as links to pdf leaflets, or "you can read our blog etc" . Is there a minimum number of repeated words required before its flagged as duplicate content? Another example is a customer gave two testimonials for two of our employees - the testimonials were identical other than the employee names - if these were posted on separate pages is it a problem for the site as a whole or for both those individual pages? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Brabian0 -
Duplicate Content, Same Company?
Hello Moz Community, I am doing work for a company and they have multiple locations. For example, examplenewyork.com, examplesanfrancisco.com, etc. They also have the same content on certain pages within each website. For example, examplenewyork.com/page-a has the same content as examplesanfrancisco.com/page-a Does this duplicate content negatively impact us? Or could we rank for each page within each location parameter (for example, people in new york search page-a would see our web page and people in san fran search page-a would see our web page)? I hope this is clear. Thanks, Cole
On-Page Optimization | | ColeLusby0 -
Duplicate Content on our own website
Our website sells tickets for events. We also have an news articles section with information about events / artists / venues. From time to time we release a product page and a related news article on a separate page. Some of the content in the news article would be perfect for our product page. Essentially its our product page we want too rank. Would it harm our SEO if we had some of the same content on both of these pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate Content: Snippets from Blog on Website
Our company has a website and a blog, each on a separate domain. On our website's home page, we include snippets from some of our blog posts and links to such posts. The snippets include the same photo, title, and first line or so of text. We have been told and am concerned that search engines will categorize this as duplicate content. Any recommendation as to how we can get around this issue aside from not including the blog posts on our site? I imagine we are not the first company to want to do this. www.angelicolaw.com Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | BrazilLaw
Greg0 -
Duplicate content "/"
Hi all, Ran my website through the SEOMOZ campaigns and the crawl diagnostics give me a duplicate error for these urls http://www.mysite.com/cat1/article http://www.mysite.com/cat1/article/ so the url with the "/" is a duplicate of the one without the "/" Can someone point me out to a solution to solve this ? regards, Frederik
On-Page Optimization | | frdrik1230 -
Duplicate Content using templates
Hi, Our web site is designed using a template, which means the header and footer is consistent across all pages. Only the body content is unique on each page. Is the google bot able to see that the header and footer content is defined by the common template? Will this have any impact in terms of duplicate content? For example, we have a two line text in the footer that summarize the services we provide. Because the same text is in the footer of all pages, i am concerned about creating duplicate content. Finally, does it make sense to include keywords in header and footer of the template? Will it have any positive or negative SEO impact?
On-Page Optimization | | petersen0