Is a dynamic online user list bad for SEO?

[fablau]

Hello everyone,

I have a question that is currently puzzling me, and I hope you can help me with.

On musicianspage.com (one of our websites), we show a list of online users embedded within the page which, as you may expect, changes all the time according to who's online at that moment. That list appears on every page of the site, so at any time any page on the site has a different content and different link profile (sometimes we have just a few users connected, other times we may have over 50 users connected at the same time).

My question is: is such a "dynamical-embedded" list bad, good or neutral from a SEO stand point? If it is bad, what do you suggest to do? Put it inside a frame? Using AJAX?

Any thoughts and suggestions are very welcome!

Thanks in advance to anyone reading this.

All the best,

Fabrizio

[fablau]

Thank you Geoff, that makes sense to me... I will try to pursue what you are suggesting.

Thanks you again!

All the best,

Fab.

[GeoffKenyon]

Hey Fabrizio,

I think this is a very case by case issue. For musicianspage.com, I would probably lean towards make it JS based or removing it primarily because most of the profile pages that I saw are pretty empty and I wouldn't want search engines to find a lot of thin content here.

There could be value in this if all users had a more complete profile AND they participated in a lot forum threads - this could help with content discovery (for the threads) and pass link equity to the threads, helping them bring in traffic. If this is your goal, you would need to do a leader board, not just online users, so that you are getting users who have actually answered questions and these users are most likely to invest in their profiles and fill them out well. As it stands now, if you want to keep the online users, I'd probably make it JS based.

Good luck!
-Geoff