I know links in signature lines can be helpful for driving traffic to your site, but will it be of any use as a backlink for SEO? Does google or yahoo pick them up? I've have joined a number of forum in the past few weeks and while I enjoy them and have been learning, I haven't seen any links coming from them on my pages when I look at my backlinks.
If your link is from a reputable, established, old forum site, then that would count. I notice that when I joined a Joomla forum site.
in terms of link juice from forum signature, you will not get much. read more here: http://www.seofocused.com/blog/forum-link-building-do-backlinks-from-forum-signature-have-any-value
That remains under scrutiny. Did Google tell them so? Do they have insiders working in Google's algorithms?
Forum posting in forums such as this has many unseen benefits e.g traffic from signature link, the Backlinks per post.
What I notice is that many of signature links in DP are ranking high in Google SERPs. If such signatures don't have value, then what else?
First you need to add a signature to your post My posts on digitalpointforums are seen by Yahoo within a week of posting. I think with forums you need to have a certain number of posts to be able to put links in your signature. So if you're only looking to create spam profiles - they probably won't work. Spam profiles don't stick too - so you're just wasting your time on them. There are also other benefits you get from posting on forums: 1. forums related to your business you get to see the problems that your potential customers have - that would help you address their problems and use that knowledge to improve on your copywriting or provide other products for them. 2. you get to interact with other people who could become your customers or business partners 3. you will be able to get a lot of valuable information. Instead of paying for expensive ebooks online you can just go to forums like DP - best free education you'll get IMO. There are other benefits but those are the top 3 I think.
Forum Signature will definitely a seo booster for your website. But you need regular discussion on quality forum websites.
Yahoo will consider it for backlinks, but Google won't. But the primary use of forum is to share the knowledge.
You are talking before 2 or 3 days, you know that Google was updating PR, then how do you expect that Search engine show new back links show fast. I think you have to wait and all links will be shown in yahoo tool bar.
Buy an old domain with high PR and add pages that appear in directories. Say for example.com/whatever.html is listed still in Google ... recreate it and put content by kind permision. then keep adding GOOD content and see the PR drop a little but be way above the PR0 that kills your early attempts. Even if all you do is buy a domain with high PR and 301 redirect ... that is better than spending months of hard work t get a PR2 at best.
Personally I would focus more on the ability of driving traffic through signature links, rather than the PR aspect. After all it is better to build other sources of traffic than Google, to ensure that in case of an algorithmic change or penalty by search engines, you can still get decent level of traffic.
Some forum pages get indexed in matter of minutes, I am sure links on those dofollow forum pages helps. As like other usual SEO factors it gets more credit if # of outgoing links is less, if its related etc.
Also, keep one thing in mind, spamming wouldn't get you far and actually get you bad rapport. Here is a blog post I wrote on this subject, sometime back, Forums, a good source of targeted and relevant traffic
Spamming is pretty useless. I think though that if you add yourself to niche directory (coffee sellers directory and you sell coffee) that is OK.