Thread: SEO Benefits

My online shop includes a small but growing system of of forums, one of which is a "member's lounge" for off-topic discussion, jokes, links, and so on. Currently it is accessible to registered members only; others (including search engine spiders) don't see it.

I've been thinking that if I allow non-members (including spiders) to access that off-topic forum, I might gain some small search engine benefit due to having an additional 1000+ pages indexed. (Right now I have 28,800 pages indexed in Google, and 24,500 in Yahoo.) All of these pages link back to the home page and other relevant site areas.

But on the other hand, apart from the navigation links, most of those pages aren't even remotely related to the rest of my site, or to any search terms I'm interested in. I know that linking to irrelevant pages is a bad thing; is linking from irrelevant pages, or simply having those pages on your domain, also a bad thing?

Any answers or insights are much appreciated!

If you are worried that your site would be drastically affected by linking to inappropriate or unrelated contents and you still want search engines to index your off-topic forum discussions, then you can set all links in this part to be all nofollow. You can set an argument that would check if the page is included in the off-topic forums, and if the condition is satisfied, then the links would be set to nofollow.

Benefits of Search Engine Optimization

SEO offers result-oriented promotion for any online business.
SEO helps in achieving higher page rank on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Msn).
SEO increases the visibility of one's site enabling owner see more sales and growth.
SEO offers excellent return on investment (ROI).
SEO is cost-effective and easy to implement.
SEO increases the accessibility for all users, especially your targeted audience.
SEO services are targeted at some of the major search engines and directories like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, etc that rule the Internet nowadays.