If I change my forum sig link in my profile do the links already posted also change, or do they remain as they are? I'm a little worries about getting lots of links all with similar anchor text to my pages and it not looking natural.
Everytime you change your signature, all your posts are updated with the new signature. I wouldnt worry too much about forum sigs looking unnatural, their are reports that search engines may be filtering them anyway,
MSNbot is constantly crawling forums and indexing signature links. Changing your sig file is a good way to get your site spidered quickly
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According to my testing last year, Google completely ignores forum links -- both in message body and message subject. (How? I have no idea!) According to my testing right now, Google treats sitewide links the same as a single link.
so....couldn't I run a php script to show the link 33% of the time or 50%? would they be treated differently then? That sounds kinda silly. (of google)
I personally have not seen any strong evidence that sig links work well in Google. If they don't work today, chances are they wouldn't work any better in the future. However, I do see pretty strong evidence that sig links work pretty well in Yahoo and MSN. I certainly don't suggest that you rely on sig links to get good SERP in Yahoo and MSN, BUT if you are kind of a person who posts a lot in a bunch of forums, I don't see why you shouldn't utilize them. They work well, and Yahoo and MSN bring you substantial amount of traffic. Sig links aren't very sustainable. They get buried under as time passes. They get wiped out in many forums as threads get archived, BUT I've seen many people who have tens of thousands of posts on the web that are not buried under or archived. Why not use them?
It wouldnt matter if the forum was mod rewritten, if the search engines are going to dismiss them then cleaning the url will not help.
There are primarily two ways to get your forum indexable. 1. Remove session id if and when SE see your forum. You specify bot names and when these bot names are recognized, remove session id. 2. Remove session id for all guests, i.e., non-registered members. Non-registered members automatically include SE, and this is more ideal, IMO. It's because you can actually see exactly what SE see. mod_rewrite is believed to make indexing easier for SE, but it's not absolutely necessary. Also I should note that MSN indexes as many forum posts as it can EVEN IF the forum is not SEO-ed. MSN just indexes forum posts appending session id.
I wonder what forum links do too. I'm beginning to think they hurt, along with site wide ones, however I have no proof.
If the forum is a popular one then yeah it can help to get it spidered faster, but that doesn't mean it will help your ranking in the SERP's. But, getting spidered faster is nice.
No IBL hurts you in principle. The worst thing that can happen is that you get 0 benefit from certain IBL.
I doubt forum links hurt, but I don't think they help much either. For example I have 655 posts on slashdot , but changing my sig doesn't seem to have an effect on search engine ranking for the linked to sites. Also most forums don't allow the title tag. High ranked comments on slashdot do bring in some traffic through a sig link, but only for a few hours while the story is on the front page.