Right but what Google should be doing is learning how to mark down links with those types of posts, so when somebody bumps a thread just for another post with 2 words their sig links won't be counted as high as the other links on the page
... And how should they learn this? What google will do is to count the outbound links on a site. And do some calculations based on this.
hankyjohn, no. You can upload smiles (or other pictures) to your site and inserted them at your post It actually works
I would rather do it the right way. Think long term and you will surely benefit from it. Promote your sites the right way. When I started my first site, I used to do a lot of forum posts and have joined a lot of forums to have my signature enabled. My site gets a lot of backlinks from forums and they are really helpful. I usually do it 2-3 hours a day and have good exchange of views from other members which i also enjoyed. On forums, you will benefit a lot, you get backlinks, youll get to know people and most the most important of all, you will learn new stuffs.
Forum signature links do not have much value, and as you get more links from a site, they decrease in value. Therefore, it is better to have one link from 10 sites than 10 links from one site, because of decreasing marginal utility from each individual site.
Not all links are created equal. From what I've seen link diversity from different domains carries more weight with the search engines than sheer number of links. For instance all else being equal (and it never is) I'd rather have one link on 1000 sites (total 1000 links) than 10 links on 100 sites (1000 links) or 1000 links on one site. But I'd take 1000 links on 1000 sites So back to your original question = the more links you put on a site, the less value each link is going to carry.
I'm no egalitarian either. And I think one needs to distribute links as far as possible. And also it's better to be on more selective sites with the links. Less people to share with.
I've gotten pretty good mileage out of forums and comments on newspaper websites that offer a dofollow backlinks. They're out there.
Be more specific please. I think the profile URL maybe of higher value then the signatures in or links in postings - the reason being that there are also links from the users posting are pointing to it and that it is pointed to from other utilities on the forum.