[B]Members Profiles[/B]
Nearly all sites have users online at the bottom of the site or a list of members who’ve visited in the last 24 hours. There can be hundreds in this list. As outlined earlier links in the footer have a lot of weight as they could be navigation. If you have your members profiles closed to guests as nearly all sites do you could have hundreds of dead links in a row all leading to a login page. No forum has a rel=”no follow” for members names so all links are followed. If you had to follow a few hundred links in a row and they were all dead you’d be pretty pissed.
It’s not just in the footer. Member’s names are in every post, index, forum, who’s online page, members list etc. That means that there are thousands of links that Google follows which it considers dead.
If you search as I do often an uploader or a member in Google you’ll nearly always be presented with Freshwap.net or WarezLobby.org as these are some of the only sites that have their Member Profiles open to guests and as a result get loads of traffic.