I have a question to ask those of you who actively advertise your websites in the signature of your forum posts. I realize that many of the threads that get started on popular forums, such as this one, will attain PR - and pass PR to your sites. In the past, when Google made changes to their filters/algo that reduced the amount of weight given to certain types of links (link farms, 2 way links, etc) - sites who were practicing those methods of linking lose a lot of weight all at once, and often come under a penalty. Do you not worry that this will one day apply to forum signature links? I personally believe that links with identical anchor text are watered down already a little bit... but when threads go pr4, pr5, and even pr6 I'm sure they are passing a good deal of weight along. I have always avoided it because I worry that a massive fallout for this type of advertising is inevidible... what do you guys and gals think? Am I being too paranoid?
Anything is possible in future. To date I think I see a positive effect from signature links. The draw back is they sometimes attract spammers and scrapers. Shannon
I don't think anyone can be certain of retaining all the back links they carefully created / gathered for ever. So I just keep on with the link building and other seo/m strategies. I mainly use links in sigs to get sites spidered, not to help their rankings
I think the new site spidered aspect is a useful tool aspect to the sigs - but real rank? Not holding my breath. On an active forum you may draw a few good regular visitors over time. Like chicken soup for a cold, "couldn't hurt." Well, at least, per the original post, hope not!
I participate in a few forums and include a signature where possible. However, I am not doing it for PR (my PR is pretty good already); I do it for traffic. Hopefully, a few people may be intrigued enough with the domain to visit it.
I do it to get new visits. It's that simple. Some people say Google has already develued sig links and I'm ok with that. Many forums are moving to a built-in nofollow and that's cool too. It does seem to help getting new pages indexed but I see that as a bonus - so do site maps. I never get links for PR as that is a complete waste of time IMO (yea, yea - stay on topic). Maybe sig links help with the SERPs but since I don't count on them I'm not worried about the SEs suddenly dropping them.
I would worry if backlinks from sigs were the only link building method I use, but "never put all your eggs in one basket" is one cliche that comes to mind. I would continue to use links in my sig even if the forum used nofollow tags, because traffic and SEO are different sides of the coin. Like rmcarley alludes to, sigs generate traffic. Where else do you have a captive audience that you know is reading the page?
I figure, they are better than nothing. Anyways, they are coming up on google, so I am happy for now!
If the product you are advertising in your sig is related to the forum you can get a fair amount of traffic.
I wouldn't worry about it penalizing your site as Google states backlinks will not hurt as long as the are natural and forum post are natural. The benefit is that you can get PR for a extended amount of time provided that happens from you links in your sig. When they get bumped down the priority list it will go back to where you would be without them except you will still have some juice coming from the existing links. make sense?
Forums help the world wide web by expanding knowledge so why would google penalize them by penalizing their members.
i am couraged. it's the time to make digital point become very useful and helpful forum, not just for linking though
Links in your signatures are just a bonus for me, I would still post in the forum even if links were not allowed. If the moderators keep a close eye on what is posted (which they do) then spam is reduced to a minimum. I have seen forums that include all sorts of crap that are posted on genuine threads which annoys me but here the posts are mostly relevant.