Hello sweetfunny, why do you think it's one of the worst ways? I believe that it's not only helpful for the search engines listing, but also for acquiring targeted traffic. Forum members will eventually hit your sig if they are interested, which is much better than just falsely generated traffic for high SERP. regards
I don't "think" they are hopeless for getting indexed, i know they are and have tested it extensively and so have others. Have a read of my post here where it took me 3 months to get indexed via DP signature links alone. There's also a link to a 9 page thread where a number of members added a new site to their sigs and couldn't get it indexed. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=3604539&postcount=10
Sweetfunny, I hope you don't mind me beating on this dead horse here. Links from forum signatures won't help you one iota in the search engine rankings. The quality of the links are about as low as that of the prime real estate in Gary, Indiana or in Harlem. Me? I'll take my lakefront property in Chicago (that I don't even own) any day of the week. What forum signature links DO help though is with getting human visitors. Especially if the sites are relevant to the forum or the topic being discussed. People are naturally curious and if they like what they see, they may bookmark the site, tell a friend or three about it, and as such you may see a natural backlink or two come from one of those people linking to your site in a blog entry or article (citing you as a source, for example).
You are 100% spot on, finally someone who understands. And no i don't mind at all you beating a dead horse, people just don't seem to understand how little value signature links have on SERP's and Indexing. When you visit www.backlinkwatch.com it displays around 350-400 links on each page, and over 100 of these can be outbounds all on a page with little to no PR. But yes, DP sig links provide great human click traffic. I get more referer hits from DP then high traffic homepage links on PR7 sites.
Don't worry about Page Rank, it's just a number and color. Posting in forums will probably not help your PR much at least not for awhile because the threads that you will be posting in will not even have PR unless they are really old. Anchor text is the text that is used for the link. It will help your site rank higher for that specific text.
The "indirect" ways of SEO are entirely overlooked by Newbies. You can start a war with your signature if you did it right. (In this case, "war" is a good thing). Brandon
Ok i give up, did you even read my post in the link i provided? No, right well i'll summarize... For 4 months i had a link with the anchor "Virtual Memory Optimization" which contained just 986 results when searched for in quotes. The URL was a SEO test and was linked from nowhere besides here. It took 3 months to get cached, and after three months with 1,500 posts some in threads with PR3 i ranked NOWHERE for my anchor text. Also have a look at This Sig Experiment by several members, a couple of months and did not get indexed.
If I add signatures to my posts from now on and post 100 quality/non quality topics a day, will it increase the PR. Does quantity per domain matter?
should I be consistent with the anchor text when making signatures and directory submissions, since sometimes ex. When I go to a site of mango's my anchor text is "mango forum" when I go to a forum of apples my anchor text is "apple forum". but the surl is "appleandmango.com" Should I be consistent with just mango forum only, apple forum only or mango and apples forum only with just 1 URL?
Hello, What I can agree on is that your situation possibly happened. But, I also agree on the fact that if you are linked by a high PR page (PR6, PR7) - your site will be on Google in much less time than months. It might happen to be weeks, even days. The point is - where to find a such valuable high PR page in a Forum. Have you noticed some here in the DP forum? As I was thinking, I just visited the experiment thread and I see that there is no page rank. Zero. I believe this is the answer to your questions. Regards