Maybe this has been asked before, but I can't find it. I think most forums are "no follow," and so, what is the effectiveness of signature links? Can signatures help with indexing, or SERPs?
Yes and Yes Yes form sig. links can be effective for targeting keywords if they are followed which should help your SERPs. Yes form sig. links will help get your website indexed if it's a popular forum that is crawled often. Now exactly how much it helps probably not much but every little bit is a step closer to your goal.
It is working if you put signature link on the forum. Just do it and it will doesn't matter if it is a backlinks
But as been said many times here by people far more knowledgeable than me, if you look at the juice that comes off of a page like this one (e.g., as one rough metric, the PR)... and then you consider the dozens of links that share that juice, you probably don't get anywhere near enough benefit to make signature posts a "link development" activity...
Of course, forum sigs are counted as backlinks and that can help your serp ranking. But i'm not sure that if you have 100 posts, you can have also a 100 backlinks.
yes.forum signatures counts as backlinks. if you place some cheesy keyword it might help you bring traffic too.