I know a lot of people out there including myself really want to know how much google juice we are creating when we post with a backlink to our site in our signiture. A moderator over at another web hosting forum has over 23,000 posts and has said this about forum sig links with Do Follow forums, I hope you find this information useful:
Google doesn't take User Generated Links seriously. Blog comments, social bookmarking links, forum sigs, you name it. They're just a form of link injection from Google's POV.
Good information on sig links. I figured out through my own tests that most of what they mentioned is correct.
=> Google doesn't recognize a page as a forum. They only see it has a page. It has no more or less weight then any other page. Thats wrong.. some pages may have more internal links, thus making it more weight then others.. BUT in general he is right..
Interesting thread. so basically its worth putting links in the signature but don't expect much from them PR wise.
A link is a link. But it's a lot like having someone mention your site in conversation. Sometimes it's really more for branding than for actual visits, sales, whatnot.
well, lets say if the forum where you are posting has a PR 5 or 6 with your signature links that will definitly count a value to the serp ranking such as here in some DP forums
Yes, it passes little juice but it is still juice since I am enjoying this forum and posting frequently. Although it passes little juice, signature links are vital to get a new site indexed by Google fast because of the frequent spider crawling.
Although it is way below 1% of my site's traffic, I still do get about 85 visitors a month from DP. So just from that minor traffic standpoint, it seems to be worth the brief time it takes to add your site(s) as signature links, then just forget about them and let them do whatever good they will do. Those 85 visitors are certainly better than the zero visitors I would get if I ignored using sig links.