Is it a bad idea to put a link in your sig if the forum is not related to your site? Eg I have mine in here, but ideally the links would be from ecommerce forums. Do people use forums to get relevant links, or just links?
Forums are mainly used to drive in traffic. Go ahead and use the signature, there is nothing harm to your site in doing this. Relevant links are good but that doesn't mean you ignore non relevant links especially with huge traffic sites
Nu it is not a bad idea I use forums just to get links. And I can control the anchor text of the backlink
If you are participating actively in forum with right comments and not spamming it by useless things then I don;t think there is any problem in putting links in signature.
Yes mishdog you are absolutely right most of people joins forums for get relevant links or just links
Forum signature can really help to raise the ranking of a site even if it's not related but it's still best if you can get some backlinks in related sites.
Forum signatures are spam, and should be disabled on all forums. Who actually reads them anyways? If their sole purpose is to provide means to link to another site, why not call it what it is?
related forums would be the best bet, but high PR forums do provide some adequate link juice back to your site for the anchor text you are using.
You are usually allowed to use non-related sites on your signature as long as you post useful and not spammy. Usually people do this to get some backlinks, so if you are doing this make sure that the forum is dofollow. If you want to promote your website via forum posting, and drive traffic to your site, then it is better to post on related sites. Just post useful things and you will start to generate some good traffic.
If you use the signature option to promote your site that isn't a bad thing at all. There are so many people using this forum and all of us have the same interest, webmastering, but we also have our own different interests. Mine for example is drumming, if I see a signature that includes something about drumming or a drummer there's a 99% chance that I'll take a look at the website linked to. So it's not a bad idea to use a site in a different niche. Although if you do it for the traffic it's pretty normal that in terms of traffic a webmaster related link will get more visitors than a link about movies
There is nothing wrong with it but since you will be posting in a place irrelevant to your Niche. The traffic figures might not be all that impressive.
Don't worry about that, you just have to participate with great sense and you'll get good quality backlinks.