SEO Best Practices for Customer Portals

[ASCI-Marketing]

We have a customer portal which is used to display customer's serial numbers, the knowledgebase, support ticketing information and forum.  This information is behind a wall as a user must have support in order to view.

The question is what are the best practices for SEO with the customer portal?  Should we block these sections from bots?  Is there a way to take advantage of the number of pages that are within the portal?

[Xiano]

What would a user who wasn't logged in see if they visited it?

Depending upon your company, I would suggest exposing the knowledgebase, that could possibly rank for people looking to solve problems that your products would help with. Same with the forum. If you chose to do that, you might be better off simply moving that content to somewhere else in your site structure.

For everything else, Google wouldn't typically be able to login, and what would you actually show it? It's not a customer, so it would have any tickets or products to list serial numbers of. You could detect that it's GoogleBot and show something else, but that's very bad practice!