I understand most people don't even look at signature links anymore unless your really on topic. I was wondering if you buy links in 10 peoples signature on 5 different forums and they posted 2 times a day each... would this help your or hurt your pr? i understand that the links will be from just 5 different domains, but i was wondering if it would be a good source of traffic and if it would help or hurt you with the search engines.
not sure signature links are good or not but they do give some traffics same as you only couple visits a day
Personally i dont buy forum signatures, if you do make sure its from someone with a good rep on the forum. I find posting quality things gets your link looked at more.
If you're on a do-follow forum, then you probably get more benefit from the SEO than from direct traffic, although you will get a handful of traffic as well. That said, you can also get penalized in SEO if you're not careful - if you buy links from 10 people, and they all put in signature links, the next time those forums are crawled, ALL backdated entries by those posters will contain links to your site - for a huge total number of backlinks. That looks fishy to search engines. If you are going to go with more than one or two people posting sig links for you, don't do it all at once.
Why would it hurt your PR? From what I understand, Google does not penalize your site because it is being link from anywhere. They know that you don't always have control of where you links are located. I think in certain places it helps your PR to have a signature link, but I don't think it can hurt your PR.
Forum sig links work well in a related areas. For example, I added my blog's link to a sig in an xbox 360 forum and recieved LOADS of visits. Just get your link out there as much as you can. Even if it only benefits you a little, that is better than nothing. Personally I wouldn't pay for it though. I'd recommend just doing it yourself in related forums and posting useful information. You become a trusted user/member and it encourages people to follow you and your links.
It totally depends on topic of your site and title being used. I get decent traffic from signatures in this forum on my free directory list and directory but same can not be said for other links.
A sig about link development under a FANTASTIC post on the same topic can pull in a lot of traffic... If you are posting anyway, the sigs will certainly help. You will find though that unrelated sig links don't get a lot in the way of direct hits though. It can certainly help for that! And if you are in it just for the fast indexing, you could theoretically change your signature daily or even every few hours. Posts on DP have made it into Google within minutes... your mileage may vary.
You can get a decent amount of traffic from your signature but this really depends on the nature of your posts and if you have something informative to say. If your post ads value to the conversation and you can teach someone something on that particular topic then I find they are more likely to click on your sign.
In my experience, signature links can provide good targeted traffic because those who click on them are usually interested in the niche of the site that they click on, but It's not a great converter nor does it provide lots of traffic. I do use forum signatures and think they are a good idea, but they are not enough on there own. You need other incoming links to your site too.
There is absolutely no harm in creating more links to your own site, if you read through the Google guidelines they clearly state that you cannot be penalised for inbound links as you have no control over them.
Forum signature drive a lot traffic to my own but I've never buy another signature link. I used my own and find that it was a good way to build a traffic.
Stay away from buying links. Buying others forum links is against Googles TOS and not worth the blacklist. Just post your own slowly and it will pay off in the long run.