Ok, before anyone bashes me let me say I think digitalpoint is an amazing website and I love it. What I am wondering though is if the main pages of the forum have PR but under the threads there are no PR does that amount to anything in terms of increasing page rank by having a signature here. I mean yes I'm sure it gets great exposure for whatever is being promoted whether its a comedy website or a blog on the best way to put toilet paper on it's spool holder. Regardless I guess what I am wondering is if anyones PR could actually go up from having their site linked all over this site?
IMO...very little benefit aside from exposure. Last count I have roughly (very roughly) 7000 sig links and only a couple are recognized by google as "backlinks". That said, sig links are still valuable as DP is one of my top referrers
It is mostly a traffic builder but it can index a new site quickly and it does count for some back links. If you have an interesting site, you could get a lot of traffic from a a popular signature link.
I post on a few different boards ranging in different topics and I receive a few hundred uniques a week from each on average. Isn't bad because a few click through and I enjoy it. I recommend posting on message boards that coincide with your niche because you would be amazed how much targeted traffic you will receive.
Signatures links here on DP give you a great exposure and they are still a lot of backlinks to your site as well.
I think the main benefit of signatures is too be traffic and exposure not PR and backlinks although you can get some backlinks
Like most, I have tons of DP links that show in various link tools. Almost all are PR0. Curiously, one DP link is PR3.
For me, the exposure (and thus traffic) gained from sig links here and on other related forums is far more valuable than backlinks
Its always a good idea to market your site almost in all the possible ways you can think of, but how do we measure the value of a link!!?
Yup, they are used mostly for direct traffic, rather than looking for backlinks from sigs(very unlikely)
Who said anything about a PR3 thread... i'm saying that for me, personally, i'm more interested in the fact that the traffic DP provides me generates sales than I am in the PR value of the threads I post in.
the other sites are giving to the digital point threads. for example , i have over 6500 posts . links in my signatures means 6500 backlinks
First I would like to say that [quality] traffic is far more important then PR, listed backlinks, or SEO. After all, it is the members and the guests of your site that make it what it is. As without them the only backlinks you'd have are the ones you've created yourself. If you are pushing aside a form of advertising because it is not listed as a backlink or effects your PR enough, but will still bring in quality traffic then personally I think you may have something wrong with you (you used generically and not specifically) http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=216611 There are several profiles here with fair PR as well. I have a PR 2, and there are some with higher.