I am not sure how much weight forum links carry? But I do find they are counted as backlinks from several backlinks check resources (Google webmaster tools, yahoo explorer, cpanel of my host server, Market Samurai) and they do bring traffic to my websites. And I think the most important thing is that I can learn some stuff by reading threads. BTW, forum signatures seem like the easiest way to get backlinks.
The official Google Blog already mention this. Forum links counts, so do the blog commenting. But only if you put quality post or quality comment.
you think they parse the posts or comments to check their size, "spaminess", etc? it doesn't seem too complicated to implement, so they probably do
Forums links have always worked for me in general. Good for link building AND for relevant traffic. Just make sure the forums you post in are related to your subject matter, especially if you want relevant traffic. Don't expect too many people from an auto forum to check out your website about making money online.
from my experinece forum have no vlaue with google and msn but yahoo picks up most of my post. I still post in forums because it doesn seem to bring in traffic even though only yahoo is indexing the links.
its hard for me to surfing in english ,but large people say links are good for site. i should work hard to do so.
Forums links is helpful in the SEO but it depends upon the relevancy of of your discussion threads. Suppose if you have added travel site in signature links and the thread is going on for SEO discussion then no content is relevant to your links and in this case you will surely get less benefit.
I believe they have not much SEO Value. But they will help you drive quality and unique traffic to your site. When Google notices that then the authority of your site will grow out of that traffic. If you provide top content your visitors will bookmark your pages and then you will have your backlinks grow naturally and out of the efforts from your visitors. Whats also important if they bookmark they will revisit your site many times. You only have to provide fresh and interesting content.
If I posted a link to my site either in a post or a signature on this forum would it count, or is this forum nofollow?
Most forum owners will only let you drop links if your post is relevant, if not, forum admin will delete it. So more than likely if a post with backlink is passed by admin the post must have been good. I'm sure google see it that way also. So yes, some good posts with backlinks will help, but while it may be juice I do not think it is full flavoured juice.