I can't agree more with you 'bogart' Here in DP every signature link got a TITLE tag = Signature or at least the SIG HTML Code got special comments like: <!-- sig --> Your signature code goes here <!-- /sig --> So SE's can get to know it's a sign link !!!?
nice post and good question. I think each time Google will estimate the pages and give new rank for them.
I've added a site for eva mendes to my signature. Currently its ranking #36 in Google and #17 in yahoo for 'eva mendes'. Let's see if there is any movement in a few days. There's plenty of links that give no or negligible benefit.
I think they pass pr as long as they are do follow of course. Obviously, there are however much more trusted and powerful links out there...
Depends on how you want to interpret it. Basically search for a forum related to your niche and which is a dofollow. It will also take some time for the inner pages to gain pr, so you might be lucky if your signature is on the first page.
Reasons forum posts may not pass much PR. 1) Most forum posts are brand new - meaning they're PR0 or Data Not Available to start. They have no juice to pass. 2) Most forum posts are on pages that have many, many outgoing links. This reduces the share of the pie. 3) Forum sigs are easily identifiable by their footprint and might be discounted 4) They're generally unrelated. 5) You can add them yourself, therefore they have a lower editorial quality than an in-content link that's "freely given".
Nothing to worry Bogart! I love Eva Mendes, you will have my instant support . But when you think about forums. On page one of this thread there are 50 outbound links in signatures only, there are many of other links as well. Even if you have a full bottle of juice, how many drops will you get when you have to share it ?
I don't know if you guys have noticed recently, but now in the SERPS google counts the posts and last reply time of VB and SMF forum threads, so they obviously can identify links from threads if they wanted to. Therefore I wouldn't put too much emphasis on backlinks from mainstream forum software because it might be devalued by the algorithm.
I would have to say that a forum page is no different than a regular webpage, as long as it sticks around and has a good link back your site, then Google sees it as any other webpage linking to you. But if it is to maximize the seo juice, you much consider the anchor text of the link and the topic of the forum page in relation to the benefits that you receive. In other words... if your sig has a link to "Classic car restoration" and you are in a forum on that topic and the post title happens to have the keyword phrase "Classic car restoration", then you are going to get a lot of "SEO juice" or "SEO Love" because of the relevancy of the link to the page. As far as any other forum post titles, this is not to say it don't help (as said before the traffic is great!), just pointing out the optimum seo benefit of forum links.
Google does like fresh content, but I see why forums don't pass that much "seo juice" as there are many links already on one page and the page constantly is moving through the site with many new topics being created. Each forum page has no steady set of text links, they are constantly changing. This reduces the importance of each page in google eyes. thats what i think, however i have seen a benefit from having signature links.
I think I've gained quite a bit of seo juice from my signature links here at dp because I have used my signature links to target certain sub-pages in my site and it has helped my rankings in the serp.