SEO for Log in Sites

[antorome]

Hello,

I just lunched a website where you have to sign up and to log in in order to use it. So I have the home, also a blog but then the rest of the pages are let's say it "hidden".How would you do the seo for it?

I have been cheking facebook, foursquare and some others and they use different approaches. Facebook uses the same description in every single page for example.

My site is similar to foursquare users have profile, stats, history, ranking. Well, what is your advice??

Thanks a lot

[RyanKent]

Any pages which cannot be seen by users without logging in to the site are blocked from search engine crawlers. In such cases, there is no SEO to be done for those pages.

Some sites choose to offer teaser information. For example, if you log out of SEOmoz you can still see the original question, but you cannot see any of the responses without logging in. Since everyone can see the question, it will get indexed but none of the responses will be used.

[antorome]

So, Ryan, the only way of doing something "onsite" would be through the blog or may be also adding a forum or Q&A right???

[antorome]

So, Ryan, the only way of doing something "onsite" would be through the blog or may be also adding a forum or Q&A right???

[RyanKent]

Those are both options. The format is not a factor, but their accessibility is the important piece.

You can offer a private blog or Q&A section which is only available to registered members. Neither would be beneficial from a SEO perspective.

Search engines crawl the web. They (normally) do not fill out logins or forms. If you can access a page from a "clean" pc without any cache or saved passwords, then search engines can see the page as well and will have an opportunity to index it.

[ninjamarketer]

Password protected content in most cases is not indexed in the search engines. Having all the content behind the signup wall can be a barrier for you to rank for keywords in your niche. However, that does not limits you to rank since modern SEO is not just based on the on page content. There are multiple factors that influence rankings in 2011 such as site accessibility, content, backlinks, social media, online reputation, local seo, LDA, search protocol usage and more.

Rank recently wrote a blog post on the responsibilities of SEO in 2011 and it is worth reading.