Exactly Valley and as Homer said, a link is a vote awarded on merit and a signature link is a vote for yourself by yourself which Google goes to great lengths not to factor in scoring calculations. The signature location is built in to the templating system of vBulletin, and Google is well aware of this markup and places little importance on this templating replicated across pages. This not only helps crawler efficiency, but helps to separate real content from things like navigation, headers and yes paid links stuffed in footers and sidebars. See the paper "Page level Template Detection via Isotonic Smoothing" located here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~deepay/mywww/papers/www07-templates.pdf I've purchased dozens of domains solely to test and track this stuff, and have folders full of notes and reports logging how it's handled and i will say it again "Signature link have virtually zero value for SEO besides direct traffic". If you don't agree with me, all i can say is keep building those signature links and i wish you all the best in the SERP's.
I think it depends on the difficulty of the keyword. If you click on my sig I spammed this guy to this low seach term just to piss him off. On the other hand if I did this for "cheap airline tickets" then the result would be zero. I the Algo is far more complicated and it will give some weight, but only if there is no competition for that keyword. Useless in other words. It also takes the context of the link into consideration and the page metatags as well as all the bits you mentioned.
Actually I would not call that SEO, more like common sense. I just get a little wired up when people call themselves SEO experts. What you are suggesting is simple good organic website construction architecture. To me, that's not SEO, it is the way it should be done, meaningful anchor text with themed page context. Call me crazy but SEO is a dinosaur term. At the end of the day Google decides who ranks where. They even throw in a few wildcards to keep "SEOers" scratching their heads. SEO infers you are doing it to take some sort of control. Over-do your "SEO" and watch what Google does to your masterpiece. There is NO WAY any SEOer can guarantee me results that I can count on. "SEO, get your SEO here people" says the SEOer with his snake oil hat on. Buyer Beware! SEM is a better approach today, all encompassing! IMO, H
Signature links do come up in search engine. Its a nice way to get your site indexed. Also which signatures will be indexed only google officials can tell.
There is a lot of really good information floating around this forum.. and also a lot of misinformation. I hear people say all the time that "content is king" and I have to agree. I think "simple good organic website construction architecture" (as Homer puts it) is something else I totally agree with. Combined that with "content is king" and that would make a killer site. and I envy those that have the knowledge to pull it off. But I am often surprised at some statements that are made by people that seem to know what they are talking about. (I am not picking anyone out in particular) But this line makes me think that.. if everybody stopped looking at the amount of results a search engine returns as competitors. and concentrated more on content and website design.. then wouldn't the internet be a better place. After all, 179.999.000 of them results were probably not even competing for the search term, and just fluked it. all because they added content to there site. Anyway.. interesting thread.. just wanted to add my bit Cheers James
hope it is possible.... maybe .... not all will be showed Checked some members who posted more than 10,000 posts and got backlinks from signatures for less than 10 even some less then 5 bls ! Totally Cruel Google. Possible too low to be visible.
makes me think that.. if everybody stopped looking at the amount of results a search engine returns as competitors. and concentrated more on content and website design.. then wouldn't the internet be a better place. After all, 179.999.000 of them results were probably not even competing for the search term, and just fluked it. all because they added content to there site. Completely agree - your 'competitors' are on the first 2 pages, it's totally irrelevant what's happening on page 15 And good content is where you start getting results on those longtails - which paradoxically happens when you write for your visitors, not Google
1st off, never feel bad for calling someone out on a forum. It's what keeps us all honest and helps us learn and grow. James, you are absolutely right with what you said and I feel the need to further explain. Google shows 180M pages have the words somewhere on the page so with a simple google query you get 180M results ... but that's not really the competition. I really chose the wrong word to use there. A more accurate look at the competition would be the allinurl: allintitle: operators in google. Running my, uh, friends words through that I see that there are only 3k pages that show up. While that's an estimate on how many people are targeting that phrase but it's not really a true figure. None of the top 10 on the normal SERPs are returned by the allinurl/allintitle operator query (including the site in question) so we're obviously missing some competition using this method. But really, just placing a sig with anchor text to rank above 3,000 people that are really trying to rank for that phrase sounds pretty effective. If you've got the exact phrase in the url & the title you are definitely trying pretty hard for ranking it. Which leads me to this ...... Well said ... It won't do anything for highly competitive phrases, nobody disputes this. It will help get the site indexed for sure, but receive no significant bonus in the SERPs for a competitive phrase. My example above showed it works like a charm for a less than ultra competitive phrase. @ sweetfunny, I agree that you won't rank for "buy viagra" on the power of signature links but to say that the value is "almost zero" is a far stretch too. If we're grading 0-100 I'd say the value is at least double digits .... though it's a major footprint if Gg ever decides they don't like these at all. But that's not going to happen ... c'mon people are allowed to post in forums and google can't say anything about it. The absolute worst they can do is ignore all the links in their algo. I think it's plainly obvious that they are not doing that currently and haven't ever. At this point it's just a normal link on the page with 200-300 other normal links ... which is why the sigs don't carry much weight. Ooh, you gave me some ideas. Time for some Gg bowling!!!
There is all crap going on this thread. Let me post something and you will tell whether its crap too or not. Signature link do help in SEO a Little bit. So for competitive keywords, they dont seem to help a lot as a few points in favour of you because of the links will be of no use. For low search keywords, the signature can do some good for you as the points scored in the eyes of Google will be enough for getting some reputation or good placement in the Google results. Its pretty commonsense that If Google were to treat signature links as normal backlinks, people would just buy cheap $5 a month backlinks or just hire someone to make few hundreds of accounts with the minimum posts. So Google allots very little importance to the signature links. It doesnt altogether reject them. And i agree that getting a single link from an authority site is better than 100 DP signature links.. Google is smart enough to recognise that you are having a lot of signatures with same anchor text at a site. It will be better if you have the anchor text at different forums as it will give more variety of links.
My feeling around signature links is about click thrus and that's all it should be. Google should totally ignore them. Example Suppose I am a control freak. I always have my white knuckles on the steering wheel. I must always have full control over a situation. It is at a point where it is a problem for me. I just can't let go. I might look at Minstrel's sig and follow it because it may help me get a better understanding of my mental state. It is interesting what you can learn if you introduce Analytics and track who clicks what anchor text shown in sig links. Moreover, you can see how many people convert from varying anchor sig links. To me, that's about all you can expect from sig links. There are even better ways to learn what the "True Traffic Competition" is using Google's advanced preferences. Once you force Google to tell you with quality filters in place you will quickly learn that the competition is far less than "Results 1 - 10 of about 22,700,000 for search phrase". Using the right preferences you will discover that the true traffic competition is 5% of what is show, starting from 1st qualified least imperfect. Cheers, H
Thanks for the response.. I don't fell bad calling someone out that makes a statement that is not true, wrong or not in the current trend of thinking, but the line that I referred to seems to be said and believed by quite a few people. (me included) so IMHO, to call one person out for saying something that is said and believed by many is unfair. Thats a good point, and one I had not thought of.. But I must say... I can't help thinking that as time goes on, and more and more people start using blogging software like wordpress that automatically adds the title into the URL, the less effective that check will become. I probably didn't make myself very clear in my first post in this thread, but what I was eluding to is that there is a lot of honest information and opinions on the net that seem to get drowned out of the first few pages of the search results by well optimized websites. Now I am not saying that a well optimized website does not have honest information or opinion, and when you find one, chances are you don't need to refine your search, because your query has been answered. But there are a lot of sites that are very well optimized for keywords that have strings attached. And by strings I mean there motivation to get high in the SERPs is to expose more people to either there shopping cart, affiliate links or ads, without necessarily providing the best info. Also I am not saying that there is anything wrong with optimizing or having ads etc on a website, (I do) well its just that content should be the main priority, not how much money you can make from it. (unless of course the money motivates the person to provide good information) And sometimes it is worth going 3 or 4 pages deep in to the results to find the honest "no strings attached" information. the information that was put there by someone who just wanted to provide information, and not compete for the number 1 spot on Google. Homer mentioned Google's advanced search preferences.. I haven't really looked into this, but I wonder if there is a way to filter out results that contain shopping carts, affiliate links etc.. I must also say that I do use sig links, but not on all posts, I am not sure how affective they are, but I also think that having a well optimized site with good content will be of more to benefit to your website than sig links from a forum that is unrelated to your sites content. Just sharing my opinion Cheers James
Yes, good point! In addition to that it is important to note when a searcher enters a phrase they rarely go beyond the first page in SERPS. When they do their behavior changes. Their minds become more synomic and they are willing to accept less than perfection.