2 replies to this topic

[Mikl]

In another topic (Is A Profile Link Enough?), Qwerty mentioned that "In the case of this forum, signature links are invisible to search engines".

I'm curious about how this works. I know that you can use the "nofollow" attribute to tell a crawler to disregard the target of a link, but I don't see any "nofollow" attributes in any of the discussion pages in this forum. Is there some other way of making links "invisible to search engines"?

I realise this is more of an HTML question than an SEO one, so by all means tell me to go somewhere else. I'm only asking out of curiosity.

[Jill]

In the case of this forum, one has to be registered and logged in to see signature and their resulting links.

Search engines are not registered nor logged in, so they don't see the signatures nor their links, and therefore cannot index or count them for anything. The signatures basically don't exist as far as search engines (and non-logged in visitors) know.

[Mikl]

Ah, now I understand. Another mystery solved. Thanks for the explanation Jill.