Perhaps this is just morally ambiguous and not black hat, but I read an article saying that you should go into forums and participate constructively, but then use a smiley as anchor text with one of your links. This way you are not interfering with the user experience of the forum by sticking a url in someones' face, as it won't even appear as a link at all, other than to the SEs. Does anyone think this is invalid, and do you think a forum moderator would toss you for doing it?
That's a genie trick. I hardly wait to see what a moderator has to say. Anyhow, I think few people will click on a smile.
You won't really get any traffic, but you will get a backlink, although without any anchor text its quality will be diminished somewhat. Also, if you get rumbled then you may end up with a bad from the respective forum.
It is a neat trick but I don't see why you should go after such link when you can easily build backlinks from sites that allow dofollow forum sigs.
@ReformedSinner its better to have 100 links from different dofollow blogs than 100 links from the same dofollow forum.
Spamming forums for links, with or without anchor text will hardly yield any results. Just review the number of outgoing link this post will have after the page is full. We have 2 (many forums allow 4) in SIG, don't forget to count the other links like 'in-post' links many threads will have. And number of backlinks for a post? Almost none, accept from forum navigation. We are talking about using 'very little' PR juice and distributing it among 50+ outgoing links (+ internal links + nofollow links with the new changes).
Hey thanks... so if I understand this correctly... each link is worth less if there are a lot of links on the page? Is that what you mean?