Username change on a forum

Serps

[teaandbiscuits]

Can changing a username affect a sites ranking?

Say you have a large forum and one of your members asks for a change of username and they have posts in the 1000s,would this make any difference to your place in the serps with so many pages having a change in the on thread text,however small?

[fathom]

Not likely unless there username is however included in the thread/post urls?

[engine]

Yes, agreed, it's very unlikely to have any impact, unless there's a link involved in it. Even so, thousands of posts changing are only likely to refresh in a while as the search engines will take time to re-crawl.

[lucy24]

And finally ... unless you're using some very weird arcane one-of-a-kind forums software, search engines know which part of the page content is a username. It's always going to be wrapped in distinctive formatting surrounded by consistent bits of HTML. And unless-etcetera, changing a username will only change what's displayed in the "username" slot. It won't retroactively change "quote" posts ("soandso wrote 'blahblah'").