Hey guys right I have some news on the experiment that I have been doing using the forum signature links on DP. As you can see I have been a member since November 2007 and since then I have had over 2,000 posts. With these 2,000 posts I have had signature links which have been do follow thanks to Digital Point in these signatures I have kept one link the same all the way til now. However the other week a guy advised me to try changing my signature links to No follow so after I found out how to do this I tried. Now before i start I am not saying this is actually linked with changing my signature link to No follow however it is quite suspicous, although it has only been a week since I changed them so you would think any effects this may have would be next week or a couple of weeks from now. However this is what happened, I changed my signature links to No follow on either Saturday or Sunday of last weekend. Not this weekend just gone, the weekend before. Now before I started this experiment in Google Webmaster Tools the amount of external links i had to one of my websites had been stuck on about 4,400 links for the last 3-4 months, now I found this rather annoying but couldn't understand why. As well as this I was waiting to get sitelinks on my website, for no reason in specific just I wanted them and also my sites search engine rankings were always changing, yes probably due to Google having a jiggle but in comparison to other websites it was a lot more. Now this is what i did, I changed all of them to no follow links, as I didn't want to take them off because I do receive a nice amount of traffic through DP, so instead i decided to change them to No follow as DP automatically makes links Do follow meaning for every post you make you will receive one backlink to the websites in your signature (Now don't go spamming posts everywhere people, we have enough of that). I am reporting this today, as this is the first time I ve checked Google webmaster tools for a week or so, and I can report that the number of internal and external links i have on my website have increase. The number of external links currently stands at 5,500 ish and internal have also increased by a couple of hundred. As well as this my search engine rankings seem to have started to improve, now this is hard to judge only after a week and a half or whatever its been now, however it is positive. Lastly I now have sitelinks to my website, not sure for the reasons why but hey I am not complaining. Although these cannot be evidently explained to be linked to the fact that I have made my signature links No follow it is like I said in the beginning quite convenient. If you want to know what the No follow tag to put in your signature links are, it is Anchor Text (remember keywords)] Anyways, anyone else experienced this?
A little confusing post or may be I am not that used to read long posts but thanks for sharing the experience. So in short, you are saying that as soon as you made the signature nofollow, you got more backlinks recorded by google but why ? can't this be just a coincidence ? I am not able to understand any relation why will google increase the number of backlinks when you remove DP signature Congrats for getting sitelinks though, they always make people click to your site
I would think it was just a coincidence. Perhaps Google just happened to update in the middle of your experiment. I doubt making links nofollow would have any kind of positive effect on your rankings.
you should check in a week or so and see if the back links drop, but I think google webmaster also counts no follow links too
Google webmaster tools also includes nofollow links, so this has no effect using that medium of observation.
As i said I am not sure if this has any relation at all i just found it very coinincidental that this all happened after i changed my signature to No follow considering there had been no movement for months before.