I run an online game. The only pages one can access without an account are the homepage, register, lost password, contact me.If I were to make more of my pages public, and add links to them from the homepage, would this help gain traffic?The pages I am think about making public are the forums, player profiles and game statistics.
Search Engine, Public Facing Game
seo;authentication
Yes, because people are likely to link to them, in particular players who also have another website, blog, or profile in another service may add a link to their player profile. Depending on what's discussed in the forums, people may link to some particular threads too, but it's a bit less likely. I don't see how game statistics would help at all, though.Now, there's a difference between helping gain traffic and increasing rank with search engines. Nofollowed links, for instance, won't help your site gain rank at all, but might attract more traffic nonetheless (if players link to their profiles in a social network or forum signature etc their contacts might want to check it out).In particular, I'd suggest making it easy for players to embed their profiles in other pages in an easy and compelling fomat, like the Stack Exchange user flair.