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On reflection I've taken the suggested approach of using the nocontent tags for CSE and ensured all signature links are nofollow.

Once again ensured bots can see the signatures due to slight concern about cloaking penalty.

Thanks for your feedback.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Although not 100% clear I'm assuming this only applies to custom search rather than google proper?

Never put much time into SEO over the years, always hoped google would figure stuff out. Signature content is defintely being indexed.

For the moment taken the approach of one of the 'SEO' forum templates of not showing signatures to the BOTs. Will see how it goes. Bit reluctant to do this because slightly worried it might be seen as cloaking but hope it'll work out long term...

Hello,

first post here, just started with SEOmoz so hope it's relevant. Searched a fair bit on this without getting a good answer either way so interested to get some opinions.

The core of the site I run is a forum dedicated to collecting, for the sake of argument let's say cars. A good percentage of the users have signatures which list their collection, for example

1968 Car A - 1987 Car B - 1998 Car D and so on....

These signatures lists can be 20 items or more, some hotlink the signautres back to the relevant post on the forum, some not. The signatures show on every post on which the user makes.

What I'm noting is

a) SEOMoz is reporting a LOT of links on every forum page, due mainly to these signatures I guess.

and of more interest

b) The content of the signatures is being spidered. So for example of you search for '1968 Car A' you might get a couple of good results directly relevant to '1968 Car A' from my site, but you also get a lot of other non-relevant threads as results because the user just happens to have posted on them. Obviously this is much more apparent on the site google search.

So what is the best approach?

Leave as is? Hide the signatures from the BOTs? Another approach?