and hey, let's not forget, aside from the issue of PR, forum postings help us SEO's keep sane in the crazy world of the net. the mere fact that we get to talk to each other, silly stuff or deep ones
Depending on the alt tag it can bring traffic, you wont get that much PR from a forum signature as a thread is only useually pr0-5. Ozzu the webmaster forum has many many PR5 threads so i suggest if your hunting for PR then either post loads on that forum or buy signatures of major posters on there. (Or buy a sitewide listing like me i think its about $400 a month as i said many many pr5 threads)
In addition posting in forums will give your site more results in the search engines to knock the competitions results lower. My site comes up first, then maybe a link to my site on ebay, then links to my site from forums
forum links do all of the above but not very effective in any case. They are the lowest quality links around but anything is worth doing.
I was going to say the exact same thing. Exactly. Forum sigs are freebies...Not the end goal of a link building campaign by any means, but if you're going to be involved in a forum you may as well get some links for it!
My websites get a better PR with forums. That's because alot of the posts get copied onto alot more forums, so the link gets hit by google alot.
I think if you got links from pr2, pr3 forum pages, it will increase your site's PR. I might be wrong.
When it comes to building up a brand, the more times that you tell your story the better. Sometimes it's too easy to get tied up in the technology and lose sight of the bigger picture. I look at forum signatures, email signatures, letterhead, fax details, all as great ways of automating the job of telling your story. The investment is in setting it up the first time, then periodically checking it to make sure that the message is timely and relevant. My own personal opinion is that search engines (just like real customers) are sensitive to obvious manipulation. Don
Yeah DP is a dofollow forum. Signature links are dofollow on here also. I'd recommend a follow/nofollow addon for Firefox so you can see the links on any page and tell if they are nofollow right away. Much quicker than checking the page source or code. I use NoDoFollow 1.1 from the Firefox addons site.
In fact the links in a forum help your backlinks count and help drive traffic for you, but i think it can't give you pr link juice!
Do follow forums provide good backlinks.. The number of successful backlinks improves your page rank.. There is a particular number that is required in order to increase a page rank.. You might want to search for it in google.. I saw one but I wasn't able to take note of the site..