can DP signature hurt your SERP ?

Seen it before. More likely from other SEO seen as spamming. Your competitors contacted google to complain or something they caught onto. Best of luck. Also, keep in mind the natural growth pattern of links. If you all of the sudden put on all of your DP posts then did nothing google might see it as a strange pattern (spam or purchased linking).

 

DP signatures will bring you great traffic and gives you backlinks. It will help your SEO.

 

I agree sig link want hurt. I originally joined here because one of my competitors who is ranking at no.1 for my search term had aroung 100 links pointing to his site from here.

 

i dont think it can hurt your site much but neither bring much link juice

 

DP sigs have always helped on my sites. They provide good dofollow links from a site with high domain level PR. I'm betting that the sig isn't your issue.

 

I think a forum signature can hurt your SERP because the niche is irrelevant.

 

It is possible that your website is known by only one or few anchor text links. If so, it does not look natural and Google pay de-list your site for that particular keyword. It happened to me recently. I think you need to vary anchor text if that is the issue

 

Yea, the sig links should help you out not hurt you.

 

No, the three auto links in my sig all hit the top 5 in SERP... though my first one used to have my forum listed on it for months. When I removed it my site went from a PR3 to a PR4. I did no other link changes to my site, but am unsure if its related or not *boggle* just my random observation.

I'll likely put my forum back in my sig at a later date, so I'm actually leaning on it being a random coincidence...

 

If it hurt, ppl would remove all the links from their sig post haste!

 

How many links can you put in a sig, assuming you only have one site.

 

I think it may have to do with heavy competition. Have you remained aggressive in promoting and building link power over the months, or reached that high level and stopped working on your placement?

 

If what you suggest could be true, SEOing was the most easy task on earth:

1. Build a site, make sure it appears on Google results somewhere
2. Open DP account and add your competitor's site in your sig
3. goto 2

That way you could "burn" all the others sites that are on your way to #1.

Unless REALLY massive links are placed on the net, there is no reason for SE to "punish" you for incoming links.