Are anchor text links considered back links? Like the sig you use on forum posts how do you manage this? Will they show up in your links in webmaster tools and site explorer?
yes, they are considered as backlinks. however, how much good forum post signatures do is the question
Yes, backlinks with or without anchor text are considered backlinks (doesn't that sound redundant?) Forums sigs definitely work. They can send you traffic if you are using a good anchor text or posting in relevant forums. They can also be dofollow thus passing (very little) PR juice.
And with enough posts in the right areas, that very little juice can have flavor to it. For awhile anyways, and then new threads bump off all the ranking ones...
You know my site was just updated and I can now see that anchor text does pay off. Not totally with my page rank yet, but I can see alot more backlinks.
This is the only forum I post to regularly. I use open source CMS software and I use to go to there forum alot but I understand the application pretty well and don't go there anymore. I will spend an hour or two here every two to three weeks. The vast majority of my links are from this forum. I recently broke into pr1 status on two of my sites even though I link to all four sites in my signature on every post. In short, I think it works. PR1 is a very low score but I went with a 0 score for the last 7 months. I think I am going to go out and celebrate my milestone.
One thing for sure to be careful of is if you check yahoo se for your links make sure you understand that most of them may be no follow!