Does posting your site on a relevant forum count as a backlink?

If someone posts a link to your website and an article from your site on a competitors forum does that count as a backlink to your site just as if your url was posted on any other page of that site?

 

It should do if its not a nofollow.

 

what's a no follow?

 

"nofollow" is an attribute of the anchor element that tells search engine spiders not to follow the link.

Sites that use "nofollow" in their links are not of any value for backlinking. However, they do have value for providing traffic.

 

Yes it definitely counts. Even with the nofollow it counts for Yahoo and MSN.

 

Is there anyway to tell which forums use nofollow tags?

 

Yes....Dump internet explorer, install firefox and grab the "SEO for Firefox" addon. Then you can set to highlight all links with "nofollow" attribute.

Not going to link to them here...just google it if you want it.

 

Yup. If you install the plug-in for Firefox, you'd see that the links in this forum are not "nofollow"

 

So the links highlighted in deep red are the no follow links? using soe now.

 

are you sure about that? from search engine journal regarding how Y! treats nofollow:

 

if you do a search, members here have compiled a list of the largest forums that allow link following in their signatures