The effect of links to user profiles on page authority / ranking

[Selen]

I have a question about improving page authority / SEO ranking of a specific page.

Let's assume there is a blog page about Blue Widgets authored by 50 contributors (posters). Each contributor wrote one relevant message related to Blue Widgets. Each contributor's username is linked (internally) to his/her profile page.

The question is - would removing these 50 internal links to profiles increase page authority (and eventually increase ranking of this page)? In theory it should because links to the profiles aren't directly related to the content and - being 'inside' of the content - they may be treated as not very relevant by search engines or users.

I guess 'PageRank' of this page would increase if these links were removed too?

[martinibuster]

The content page is precisely where the link belongs. It may be a positive signal for the authority of that content and page. Site users like to read about authors because that's an authority signal. In general, rule of thumb, in my opinion if it's good for your users it is probably good for you and your rankings.

[Selen]

Ok.. I noticed some sites hide link to profile (and I thought it might have positive effects on raking of such pages..).

[lucy24]

Some sites use a timer of some kind, where you can only see other people's profiles after you've been active for some period of time, or made some number of posts. It's probably built into most standard Forums packages, at least as an optional add-on.

[Selen]

Yes, I was generally asking about the impact of these 50 links to profiles on the 'value' of content. Considering the fact usernames of authors (anchor texts linking to their profiles) are usually meaningless and could give a wrong signal (and in result the page would not rank as high as it could)...

So when content is about Blue Widgets and there are 50 internal links that don't have anything to do with Widgets it might not be the best way of persuading Google the content is truly related to Blue Widgets (or Widgets in general).

[lucy24]

Let's assume there is a blog page about Blue Widgets authored by 50 contributors (posters).

If I were a search engine I'd think it was a pretty hinky blog that had fifty authors on the same page. It's different in a forum where, among other things, any search engine worth its salt can tell that it's dealing with a forum. So it knows what the variously formatted links mean, especially when there's standardized built-in linking text.

Then again, gwt recently started claiming I have several dozen links from a particular forum I used to be active on. It happens to be a non-indexed forum (robots.txt, not noindex), the links are boilerplate "www" from my profile rather than specific files I might mention in a post-- and all links involve a single session ID. So it comes across as a slightly creepy "We know where you live."

[martinibuster]

Yes, I was generally asking about the impact of these 50 links to profiles on the 'value' of content.

An author is not content data. It is understood as author data. The search engines can distinguish between author, advertising and content data.

The search engines are way past your having to worry about these kinds of things for on-page relevance. To make it exceptionally clear you can add Schema data. But I don't think at this time it is necessary but it could be useful unless standards change and you have to update your entire site. As I said in a previous post, a link to an author can be viewed as a positive signal. The author data is understood, particularly in forums and I suspect they can detect when a forum member is a longtime established member or a spammer posting a drive-by. I have seen Google pull an avatar and use it in the Custom Search Engine results. That's a pretty good indicator that Google is pulling and understanding that data. Will they use it in the SERPs in the future? That would be cool but I doubt it.

[lucy24]

I have seen Google pull an avatar and use it in the Custom Search Engine results. That's a pretty good indicator that Google is pulling and understanding that data.

:: quick detour ::

<tr>
<td width="150" align="left" valign="top" class="row2"><span class="name"><a name="974929"></a><b>{username}</b></span><br /><span class="postdetails"><br /><img src="images/avatars/8282268304213f594892db.jpg" alt="" border="0" /><br /><br />Joined: {date}<br />Posts: {number}<br /></span><br /></td>
<td class="row2" width="100%" height="28" valign="top"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
{assorted boilerplate snipped here}
<tr>
<td colspan="2"><span class="postbody">{text of post}</span><span class="gensmall"></span></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
</tr>

That's php/bb2. You have to assume other widely used forum software packages are equally recognizable. When you've seen the same thing thousands of times, it doesn't take a lot of sophistication.