Hosted Blogging for visitors

How to prevent SEO pitfalls?

[nuevojefe]

We're preparing to relaunch a communtiy website we run with a host of new features that should mark us as the leader in that particular space.

One such feature will be the offering of blogs to visitors. This would be either [blog1.example.com...] or http://www.example.com/blog1/. Either way, our utmost concern is allowing the bloggers to have as much freedom as possible while protecting the reputation and search engine rankings of our main site.

So, does anyone have any ideas on ways to corral any any potential pitfuls such as linking to bad neighborhoods, while not being overly restrictive?

Rogerd suggested the use of the nofollow attribute which we were considering. Any thoughts on whether a high concentration of these links may (now or in the future) indicate a site that is not well-moderated and thereby more risky to return as a search results?

Any other bulletproof outbound linking methods that SE's won't spider? We've used many in the past but seems eventually they all get spidered or cause problems (re: 302). Perhaps jumpID's that are all placed in a robot disallowed /directory/?

Thoughts on any other potential problems are appreciated.

[rogerd]

I'm assuming that you in fact want the blogs to be spidered and indexed to generate site traffic... otherwise, just banning the bots in robots.txt and with the "NOINDEX" attribute would certainly avoid 100% of the problems. :)

[nuevojefe]

Heh, yea Roger you assume right ;-).

We're going to add some features that allow users to promote their blogs easily which should help draw in some good related links.