In addition to the pagerank benefit of links in your signature, links also help your new pages get crawled by the search engines. Hot threads here at DP get crawled hourly (or more often), helping those links get read by the search engine spiders more quickly.
Keep in mind though that your profile webpage link is nofollow...though that does not effect the signature link. It certainly helps with indexing! While I'm unsure of how much it helps on the various levels I can say that it does generate traffic, even for related sites such as my occult forum and personal pages. Not traffic to write home about of course, but traffic I'd not have gotten otherwise. Placing a link in your sig here is certainly worth the effort, especially if you will be posting anyway. The better the post the higher the chances that some one will be interested in clicking. Most people are ad-blind, and most of those ad-blind people are signature blind. The best way to get them to look at your sig is to say something that makes them think or something they actually have to sit there and read for a moment. That way they can not just read it while scrolling down the page like so many threads here filled with one liners. Of course, I'm not saying to be long winded like I am, lol. Just saying that posts with content have a higher CTR.
Well explain to me why not every sig link for every post counts as a backlink on this forum. And other forums it does?
it surely helps in many ways. you can get traffic, backlinks and money from DP signatures. With an eye catching anchor you will get tons for traffic from it.
forum signatures have nofollow in general .. but you can advertise your services using your signature . dont ever sell your sig spot . its precious
Sig links are an assets .... whether they attract click or not ... they will make you in good position for anchor text
Signature links has definitely helped me to boost the traffic. I would care more about Traffic than PR so it wouldn't matter if forum has doFollow or noFollow.
In my point of view, It does get you some back links and traffic at the same time. As far as I know, It doesn' hurt...
Luck of the draw? Check the source of the pages here, you'll see that the attribute is NOT here. Hence the links here are not nofollow. The only link you can give on this site that isn't followed is the profile webpage. All sig links are followable...whether or not they are or will be followed can be a different matter. Does there need to be any further explanation?
Let me put it this way--- The link in my signature was just created two days ago. It's not one of my "real" websites and it was never meant to be. The ONLY place I have posted the link is in my DP signature. Because of the link in my sig, I have gotten exactly 15 visits according to analytics. It's not quite as great as my site with 1,600 visitors a day... but what do you expect for a 2-day old site that's only promoted in a sig?
It could help a lot if its not marked with <!-- sig --> tag. This tag help recognize them as signature to SEs
Not for traffic. People follow NOFOLLOW links. Seemingly not for Yahoo or MSN either. According to many rel=nofollow only effects the passing of PR, a even google bots seem to pass through such links.