7 replies to this topic

[Techie]

How much is a regular profile page worth on any forum? Not much. The problem with a lot of forums is that there are so many profile pages that are so bloated (like 80 different sub-pages in each profile page) that they're worthless.

w3techie is different.

All profile pages are blocked from beinx indexed, except for the following members:

• Techie
  
• Flux
  
• Chococrazy
  
• M4CarbineSin
  
• Hybrid Fury
  
• Migueliscool
  
• Alyse
  
• KcThrows
  
• Mrxbox
  
• Nuclear Coding
  
• Chiuy
  
• Redds
  
• Pokjbv
  
• Vestal123
  
• Muse
  
• OfferScript
  
• Meza
  
• Mirak
  
• Gamrpro

Those members have their main profile page whitelisted. (Additional pages in their directory are blocked because they offer absolutely no unique content).

That profile page is worth a lot. When you Google any of these people's names, their profiles on w3techie will usually rank on the first page. This is a great opportunity to present yourself well to anyone searching your username.

This is why I urge you to update your profiles with a nice picture/avatar and addiitional information. It makes the difference between a generic presentation like this:



and a professional presentation like this:



How to Add Profile Information

Just click your name at the top right and click My Settings. From there you can click Edit my About me Page and add anything you want! Link people to some of your sites/portfolio, describe yourself, etc. The goal is to show who you are to anyone searching your username.

If you'd like to get on the whitelist just PM me and I'll review your profile and contributions.

[Migueliscool]

Thanks for having me whitelisted. I didnt know you actually had the power to have users not be indexed?

[Techie]

Migueliscool, on 29 January 2012 - 12:31 AM, said:

Thanks for having me whitelisted. I didnt know you actually had the power to have users not be indexed?

Well I just used my robots.txt to allow and disallow certain URLs to profiles, but I found that the SEO plugin on the forum allows me to place custom META tags wherever I want, so I put a "noindex, follow" everywhere on all user profile pages, and then I used an overrride of "index, follow" on the whitelisted member pages.

[Techie]

And check out the members list now! Only people with 20 or more posts are shown. When a new member makes 25 posts (more than most spambots), they'll be added to that "Active Members" group that gets to show on the member list.

[Muse]

I feel the names white/black listed are so raciest. Haha jk,

[ReDDs]

Nice altercall. Thanks for using me as an example, lol.

[Migueliscool]

Techie, on 29 January 2012 - 09:33 AM, said:

Well I just used my robots.txt to allow and disallow certain URLs to profiles, but I found that the SEO plugin on the forum allows me to place custom META tags wherever I want, so I put a "noindex, follow" everywhere on all user profile pages, and then I used an overrride of "index, follow" on the whitelisted member pages.

And that actually makes it not be indexed. I thought only search engines had the power to decide what gets indexed on their websites

[Techie]

Migueliscool, on 01 February 2012 - 04:27 PM, said:

And that actually makes it not be indexed. I thought only search engines had the power to decide what gets indexed on their websites

Well the point of the Robots meta tag anc the robots.txt file is to tell search engines what to index and what to ignore

Even if you want everything crawled, it's still nice to keep them out of endless loops so they can spend more time crawling valuable content.