QUOTE(Daniel Brandt @ Wed 20th May 2009, 5:45am)
That's all the more reason to level the field by adopting a "noindex" policy for all User pages. It might even take the wind out of some of those pesky teenage editors if they were unable to get a hormone kick from their Google juice.
Indeed. There was a thread on the village pump about this. Someone was wanting to know why the hell their user-page ranked higher on google than WP's article about the bird species they named their account after. I'm guessing it has something to do with the quantity of links pointing to each page?
Noindex of user-pages would make self-promotion (and certain types of cyber-stalking) slightly more difficult. And I do mean slightly.
Still, I'd support this change unless there is some meaningful down-side. Help me out here as I'm not seeing one.