Forum links may not give a huge boost to your web site ranking, but they certainly will Never do any harm
I guess the guy who started all this was out to get some enlightment.IMO Canonical knows whats goes on, if people rely on threads on DP to have an opinion without reference you can end up following such myths.
Lol, speaking of forum spams, I thought Kedroy might be a Xrumer bot. One of the way they used to spam forums is to open up an account, reply to other people's thread by quoting, without inserting links first. Then after they spammed a few hundred linkss, then insert the sign link. This will greatlly devalue tools forum spams and its effective. However, if you just track Google patents, that might not actually be what they implement, most of the Google patents are just fluff.
135.000.000 for stock market and 82.400 page indexing , wow!!!!! And about the link negative or not ,if you search trick for newbies to how to make your site popular to search engine ALL thell to make signature in forum becouse google and other search engine LOVE forum becouse have god link and important quantiti of info ,etc,etc,etc.... my opinion: if you ar asociate with ilegal site is not from signature
You can't be disappointed by the reaction to this thread, you have claimed something very controversial and provided no proof whatsoever. You say there are more professional ways to point this out to you but that statement applies to you too. There are more professional ways to make such a statement like this...ie backing it up with the proof you say you have. Personally i think your statement is complete rubbish. Why would forum signature links come with a penalty? For starters, the majority of forum users use signature links to link to profile pages or related project pages that contain related content. Social networking sites could suddenly find themselves heavily penalised if all the forum signature links carried penalties. Secondly as others have pointed out, it would be all to easy to create profiles and list your competitors sites to drag them down. I would be surprised if Google introduced rules that could allow this behaviour. I agree with others here that it is entirely possible (and probable) that Google will start applying more filters to forum signature links to devalue unrelated ones, but i can't see them ever carrying penalties. I expect if you have a forum signature link in a piano players forum to your online piano store, this would be a good inbound link. If you had a link from the same forum to your dog food store, this would not carry much weight.
I do not believe in what you are saying. If there had been any such case then the reputation of DP would have been down in the market. But this is not the case and nor even i had heard about this issue before.
How can people believe this without proof...show that first..So that will be more convincing..I think..
sometimes it feels like it helps and others it feels like it hurts. I think it depends based on the other types of backlinks for some reason.
I think you're mistaken. If this were true I could create some "competitor accounts" and create signature links to their sites to "punish" the competition. Or link to their sites from link farms, spam their URL's to the searchengines, etc.
To know whether you are being punished by Google in their search results would require that you know where you would have been in the results had you still been unpunished. Unless you've disappeared totally from the search results it's a pretty impossible to judge whether you've been punished or just lost a few places, e.g. to competitors with better links. As with links from blogs, I can imagine forum sig links tend to lose any benefit they give over time as your posts get buried deeper into the forum by newer posts. My feeling is that as time passes you don't get punished, you just see less positive benefit.
I place my link on sites like autopia.org and detailcity.org. Will this help any with SEO. I own an auto detailing business.