I have linked to my website from several popular forums, like AnandTech, Bungie, and MLG. Will those count as backlinks, because when I search for my backlinks it says I don't have any.
Yes...and No. Google discounts forum links to the point they are practically useless. I think they do some good in MSN and maybe Yahoo. But, they will bring your site traffic from the forum.
It depends on how the forum is set up...They do on this one...I dont think the links have that much SEO strength, but everything helps.
Yes they do, start spamming! Just kidding. Yes and no, as someone else said. You don't get any PR benefit from most forums (imo) but you can get the odd visitor who clicks on your sig link plus it's good to link to new sites in your signature as it can help getting them completely indexed quicker.
Agree with dfsweb. Sometimes I got my site indexed in just 2 days just by placing a new site in the sig. It usually works like a charm.
Cool. I was hoping that's what would happen, but I've had them there for a few days and no index yet.
It won't always happen in 2 days, especially since you only have 9 posts. To index your site, Google will first need to index one of the pages that your signature is on. It's also likely that only your index page will be indexed at that stage. Then, G will need to get around to indexing your entire site eventually. Also, sometimes in the first round of "visiting your site", it might only index the pages that are linked directly from your home page and then index the "2 clicks away from the home page" in the next round and so on ..... The entire process of indexing your entire site can take 4 weeks or so don't worry about it too much at this stage. Just keep the link in your signature, submit to a few directories and mainly focus on building the site and adding new features, quality content etc. so that when you do get some traffic .... they keep coming back for more!
Alright. I only have 9 posts here, but I have hundreds at the other forums. And I found one of my threads here in a Google search, and the thread contained my website address, so shouldn't it be indexed then???
Not neccesarily: I have often seen for new sites Google first caches only the title and url of the home page and nothing else to start with .... then caches the entire home page .... then the sub-pages ..... then the sub-sub-pages and so on ...... So, have patience and it will happen.
Of course putting a link of the new site in the sig is not the only way I do. For the sake of getting indexed fast, I usually put a site wide link to some of the sites with PR higher than 4 as well. Please bear in mind, placing links all around the place like forum will only increase the possiblity of getting indexed, no certain guarantee anyway. If you are lucky, indexing your site takes days, if not months.
I was told to go to google and type site:yourdomain.com, so I typed it a couple days ago and my page showed up, but I typed it today and now it says there are no results
Hey iride, it's annoying when that happens, i know. It happened to me, but not for my homepage. Sometimes G would tell me that only my index page was indexed, and then sometimes G would tell me 30+ pages were indexed, and it was back an forth like that. What I learned is that G has a number of servers around the world, and they aren't always in sync. Hence the strange results. Do yourself a favour and go here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/ follow the instructions and forget about it. People say it's not a good idea submitting to G but read what G have to say about it. I launched over a month ago, and only 170 pages of my 350+ page site have been indexed. You can't make it go faster, so relax.
Does the extention have anything to do with it? having your forum posts end with .html rather than a number? Also, what about length? Do the SE's prefer shorter url's of forum posts?
i dont think so, it just helps in gaining some quality traffic and indexing for a new site , and url fundas have almost taken a backseat in serps
I've seen sig links appear in Google backlinks searches and I'm fairly certain that they do have a minor, positive effect on ranking - if only because it shows the search engines that these sites are still active in some way.