I know that lots of people think sig links work... as long as you're patient. But I wonder if I'm doing it wrong... I've posted several hundred links at another forum on small business (with links to my small business related sites)... and I don't seem to get any noticeable effect... Would someone who's way more knowledgeable about all this explain (for the benefit of us peons, grunts, and neophytes) why and when sig links don't work? Here's an example forum post: http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/forum/showthread.php?p=66006#post66006
Forum signature links won't do you too much good, but it will definitely help. 1) It will be a backlink, and every backlinks helps (except a few on bad domains, but you don't have to worry about that here). They won't get indexed as quickly. Think of how often the pages change here, and how many threads are started everyday... it will take a while to crawl and add to the backlink list. (if you are checking your backlinks in Google with link:yoururl.com, try these other ways to check your backlinks. 2) It will help you with promoting your site... free advertising. If you have a site that is helpful to the community that the forum is based around, then you will get some steady visitors from the forum. While this approach doesn't have any direct SEO effect... people may like your site, and link to you from their site, which is a free backlink. Post good stuff... post useful stuff... and the people will come.
Yeah they do help it's also better to try and be the first reply to a topic because your site will have a better chance of being crawled
Sticker congrats for 2000 post. Well, you are right, The forum should be active by users, and daily new topics and threads and post need to post on it, use those forum which are daily having very high traffic, and post, will surely help you.
I find sig links that are advetorial in nature have better results. So instead of a sig link small business it should be Want to know how to take you small business to the next level.
I think Google likes to see links coming from a mixture of sources. Have you got other links from regular sites too?
Great info, Break, thank you. Good to know that we get knowledge plus linkjuice from forums, cool info for us newbies.
A sig link will work and will not work depends on your PURPOSE. If you want backlinks and a forums is a no follow site, then the sig links wouldnt work for it. But if you just want traffics, either it is a do follow or not, it will drive (probably!) to your site (provided you are active there and it has lots of member and visitors!)