Signature Images

[sterlingpixel]

Say I'm posting in a forum and I offer to make everyone a custom image and being really nice offer to host it at my site. Do I gain any benifit with search engines with people using a image hosted on my site in there sigs?

If not is there a way to gain backlinks in this method but without making the image clickable, people wont use them if everytime someone clicks on them they get my site.

[Tyler Banfield]

I'm not aware of a way to make the link non-clickable...

[disgust]

you could include a secondary "hosted by x" image that IS linked (and clickable) to your site.

other than that I'm not aware of much that'd help you. though I suppose it may be hypothetically possible to come up with some weird javascript solution, maybe... but forums wouldn't allow that anyway, at least in 99% of cases.

[sterlingpixel]

Cheers guys I thought that maybe the case, the idea is I was going to offer to make everyone there own customised sigs with there nicknames on one of the forums I use, amout of liks generated from these would have been at least 10,000 and would mean i wouldn't have to post so much lol.

Thought I was being clever for a min there

[LastFS]

sterlingpixel: i believe so. i used to offer a free image signature service wich was not (se)optimized or anything, and the website where i was hosting the whole thing is now PR4. I didnt even know what AdSense was, nor PageRank back then. I did it for fun, thats all.
I had to shut down the service after a few days, over a thousand people were using it and it was costing me money for bandwidth.

I'm still getting a lot of trafic because of the signature image thingy and like i said, the website is PR4. Not bad for a website wich had only TWO line of text, the images, and a title.

I've just put the service back online a month ago using AdSense this time.

<SelfPromotion>
http://www.lastfewsongs.com/
http://speakforyou.lastfewsongs.com (http://speakforyou.lastfewsongs.com/browse1small.php): Just finished this other Image Signature service last night
</SelfPromotion>

The conclusion: Go Ahead!