We've been asked a number of times why we don't use the popular 'Welcome Headers' modification on this site.
Awhile ago we did use this modification, however then we modified it to use images rather then text, in the end we abandoned the modification completely - basically there are factors you need to consider, before installing this popular mod.
1. You want more visitors? - But where do most of your visitors come from? Search engines probably...
2. You want them to join? - Make sure you got some good content, and discussions running.
Now, let's look at this modification with a little logic - we mentioned that most of your visitors will probably come from search engines, and spiders will also be hitting your website, for indexing purposes. If you view your website from a visitors point then the 'Welcome Headers' doesn't look too bad, but from a search engine spider its a completely different story. These headers are on every page of your website, if you check with a
SEO Browser you'll see the difference immediately, since spiders view text only and you have hundreds, or thousands of pages with messages all saying the same thing about joining your site; repetitive content. So, now you are ruining your
SEO rating on every page with the same header message, when you could be delivering rich content instead.
All is not lost, as mentioned previously we used them on here, until we seen our
SEO rating drop, then we replaced the text with images - images of course cannot be seen by spiders, but it still allows your visitors to see your welcome messages. Hence, your
SEO rating is not wrecked by masses amount of useless text.
In order to do this you do need to change some coding, so you can display your images correctly, and also keeping down the file size, in most cases you can get away with a gif image format.
Remember,
SEO is the main key for a successful website - all it takes is tweaking code here and there, and of course linkbacks to larger high
PR websites.
Welcome Headers Downfall Discussion 
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