Will a deeplink forum signature to an inner page (not the homepage) help ranking for a keyword? I know sitewide links can hurt your SERPs but if you have like 200 posts on a forum with a signature to an inner page of your site, do you think it will have negative impact, no impact or positive impact on your rankings? Assumptions: 1. Forum is related to theme of website which has been deeplinked 2. Proper anchor text is used 3. More than 200 posts with signature going to same inner page Your reflections appreciated. Thanks.
May I know how do you find out that having sitewide links will hurt your site? I think that it is perfectly fine. The worst case is that those links will have no effect to your site. Search Engines understand that we, as the webmasters, do not have control over external links. Hence, they cannot penalize sites simply base on the amount of links they receive from other sites. This will make sabotage very easy. A senior forum member can have thousands of posts with a link to a totally unrelated site to pin down his/her competitor. In my experience, forum signature is great for attracting targeted traffic to your site especially if you are a constant value-adding member. This is purely the reason for signature, nothing else. Ultimately, the conversion comes from human traffic.
forum links have very little value. The easier it to get the link, the less value it has... also people keep on changing their signatures which don't help much too
KC TAN : I've heard that Google devalues sitewide links and i've seen many posts on this here as well poseidon : You reckon once you set a signature, you shouldn't change it to get the best value, right?
it will have very little impact i would say. you have 200 posts and all the posts might not get indexed by google. besides, more external links there are on a single page, less value the links have. forums usually have lots of links in the signatures for which you dont really get much value
The only thing that forum links help ME is sometimes it gets my pages indexed faster....thats the most ive noticed. dont think it helps your PR or ranking