Request to all web start-ups: Please don't make my profile public by default
It's pretty simple: I want the google search results on my name to be clean and I don't want your lousy profile profile page as the top most link for my name (I am not very famous, you see :) ).
It has happened so many times: I am curious about a certain product, say rate-my-shoes.com, sign up on their website and with in a few weeks, they are the 3rd or 4th result in Google when I look up my name, saying "Rate Seshadri's shoes here!".
Then I have to go back and look for some advanced setting where I disable search engine listing of my profile, or even delete the account completely if I don't find the option to disable my public profile or don't like the product enough.
So, please, please don't make my profile available to search engines by default or at least ask me if I want to do so ! Why don't use the juice and link back to your territory if possible? Even if links are nofollowed, it might just help a person or two to find you. I agree, putting links back to your homepage helps, and these days it shows up as the first result with my name. But still, I want the other results to be relevant: such as my papers, any press we have got etc., not some random product I have tried long time ago and never even liked it. Alas, I think the SEO benefits are going to outweigh courtesy on this one, in many cases. Actually I don't think so. Profile pages aren't going to rank for anything meaningful and are usually thin on content. Having thousands of thin content pages being indexed sends a bad quality signal to Google.