Username change on a forum

Forum Moderators: phranque

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Username change on a forum

Serps

teaandbiscuits

1:16 am on Jun 11, 2015 (gmt 0)

Can changing a username affect a sites ranking?

Say you have a large forum and one of your members asks for a change of username and they have posts in the 1000s,would this make any difference to your place in the serps with so many pages having a change in the on thread text,however small?

fathom

10:27 am on Jun 11, 2015 (gmt 0)

Not likely unless there username is however included in the thread/post urls?

engine

3:13 pm on Jun 11, 2015 (gmt 0)

Yes, agreed, it's very unlikely to have any impact, unless there's a link involved in it. Even so, thousands of posts changing are only likely to refresh in a while as the search engines will take time to re-crawl.

lucy24

3:47 pm on Jun 11, 2015 (gmt 0)

And finally ... unless you're using some very weird arcane one-of-a-kind forums software, search engines know which part of the page content is a username. It's always going to be wrapped in distinctive formatting surrounded by consistent bits of HTML. And unless-etcetera, changing a username will only change what's displayed in the "username" slot. It won't retroactively change "quote" posts ("soandso wrote 'blahblah'").