Hey, I've recently become involved in both DP and SitePoint forums (a large reason is for the dofollow signature links - the old forums I was involved with were nofollow, so why not take advantage of the dofollow ones?) Anyway, I've been posting on these forums for about a week now, and probably have my sig links listed about 100 times. Google has not crawled these sites yet, so they haven't seen these backlinks yet. Do you think that when it gets around to these sites, it's going to see my backlinks, realize that it's been 100+ links in less than a week and penalize me for spamming? Any thoughts?
No. Google is not that dumb. In my experience, Google doesn't count forum sig links as backlinks anyway. I've never had any of them show up as backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools. I wouldn't worry about Google backlinks from your sig anyway. Just use the link in your sig to get traffic to your site. If Google eventually indexes you higher because of it, then great, but don't expect anything radical to happen anytime soon.
Okay, thanks for the input. I figure that if they don't have nofollow, google will count them as backlinks. Who knows though - I'll keep checking my backlinks (through webmaster tools) and see what happens.
I disagree. I use backlink tools all the time and DP backlinks show up for me. Even though I don't have a sig right now, I did before, and most would show up.
that's what i figured... they are dofollow links - there's no reason they wouldn't count as backlinks. anyway, do you think google will penalize when they see this mass amount of backlinks from DP? Right now my site only has about 180 backlinks... and I probably have about 150-200 links posted in DP from the last week or two. Will google see this as an extreme jump and think that I'm spamming?
I also disagree with the first post, as i use google analytics and all my sig links from DP forums come up as external links. Will.
They will show up on backlink checker tools, but I haven't noticed an fluxuation in my SERP's because of my activity on this forum.
Google will consider them to be backlinks if they don't have rel="nofollow" on them or the page is not using a META tag that tells them not to follow links on that page. The value of those links will be low, however, due to the massive amounts of external links on forum threads anyway. You're right, Google will follow them and count them as links if it hasn't been told not to otherwise (see above). No.
My Google Webmaster tools shows many hundreds of DP signature links. So Google is certainly "counting" them. How much credit they give to each DP link is, of course, known only to Google. I have to think Google is giving some credit to the signature links. Otherwise, why would they bother even to list them?
Definitely google counts and crawl all the backlinks without nofollow tag either a forum or blog or website. And about the dp forum, google also counts but remember that any page in which links goes above 100 will not recieve any importance in serp or page rank. So dont worry about spamming google can understand verywell when a page has more than 100 links.