[forum_maniac]

I was concerned about the fact that the same text would appear on every page, so I modified the templates so that the welcome header will only appear on select pages (such as index, faq, search, etc.). I realize this diminishes the effectiveness of the welcome headers, but I did not like Google to see the same text over and over again.

I also thought about hiding the welcome text for spiders / bots, but I was concerned this would be against the SE TOS and would get me banned. I decided against this even though it seems some forums do that, for example one major forum has their pages at Google, but when you click on the search result you get a page that tells you that you must register.

Any thoughts?

Originally Posted by freefallu

just to follow up on the SEO idea. With the recent big daddy google algo update I would advise keeping the guest message as short as possible. Googles params for differntiating a page have got stricter. That is to say the percentage to which content must be different in relation to the overall % is now higher .

If you have a small thread the header could take up 50% of the overall content , thus having the page flagged as a backdoor page. Too many backdoor pages and your out of the index ..

Therefore I would suggest keeping the header to no more than 2 sentances.