I am not sure if this belongs in the SEO forum or not, but I was wondering, if I posted often on Slashdot or similar, and my sig had links to my site, would that be the same as Slashdot linking to my site, or is it not counted at all?
See I was thinking the same idea because I noticed that I post in a lot of threads on the first page which sometimes gets a PR1 (or PR5 at John Scott's SEO Contest announcement back then ) and it doesn't mean that you should spam, but if you become an active member, you're basically "harvesting" possible good PR pages to get links to your site. When you update your signature, it changes on that thread and voila, you get linkage from your favorite forums But don't spam, try and make it useful posts so members don't hate you and you the page has content for Google to give PR to And don't bump old threads just for PR, you'll get burned by a lot of angry people.. I would have expected a BH SEO to make a script to find old PR-given threads and post in them in a forum! I would if I had the coding knowledge
I'm pretty sure that sig links are devalued, if they're off topic to the forum as well they're probably devalued again for that making them 'almost' worthless.
They are not as valuable as site wide links, but as long as there are no-follow links then it will help a little bit.
I have received quite a bit of traffic from sig links. IMO they are not as devalued as unrelated backlinks.
I have to agree with Matt here. Sig links are pretty much devalued, since it's obvious for Google who creates them However, let's not forget sig links can give you traffic from forum members -- especially if you're an active and well-respected one. I'm pretty sure some people already started saving kittens after they noticed my sig Warkot
There are pro's and cons. First of all what makes a quality link? 1. Relavance, Relavance, Relavance 2. links to page/site 3. quality of those links 4. the quality of those sites back links 5. do these sites that link to the page your link is on rank for anything 6. age of site 7. sites cached 8. sites indexed 9. IP farm 10. sites content There are many others but those are some major ones With forum posts IMO you dont get a lot of what is required for a quality link. forum sigs are posted on pages that are dynamically generated and might not be cached, have little to no back links, normally horrible keyword density and keyword proxemity. I have no idea if a search engine devalues a link based on the fact that its a forum link but probably looks at the page more then anything. Also with google doing so many hand jobs they could have devalued links from digital point but that doesnt mean that the other top 2 have. Remember google is only about 56% of all traffic. I would change up your signiture every now and then and the reason being is that if you post 1,000 posts with the same signiture that is definatly a link farm from the same IP. Its good seo to change it up. I also would expect to get much PR from them based on these reasons but if you are just looking to get a site crawled I think a forum post is a gold mine unless you have personal sites you can work with.
Ya ofcourse any type of text links from high repuatated sites are counted as one of the most important backlinks. Akash Kumar
I'm not sure how much weight they have for PR, but sig links on the right forums can definitely get new sites indexed quickly. A link from DP is usually among the first few I see for a new site. Also, as someone mentioned, you can get real traffic from your sig if you offer something that other members will be interested in.