Hi, We are in the middle of updating our design (still working on it) and forum software and now have decided that for readability sakes we have turned off the users signatures. After a few days still nobody is complaining. The thing is that there are people claiming that this is bad for SEO sakes and Google will somehow punish the forum. The forum www.webhostingtalk.nl is a well known and well found forum and I seriously doubt this will have serious negative impact for forum SEO. Maybe some users will not post anymore because of this but that is something different. I'm not an expert but you are so please advice how this will turn out. Thank you! Domenico
IMO forum took this step to control spammers who post in the forum for getting backlinks only.... who post stupid question for which they can easily get information doing google search. You don't need to worry about it, I guess the forum enable the signatures soon (when they filter the garbage).
Personally, I think limiting the number of outgoing links is a very good idea. Those people that say removing signatures is bad for SEO, do they have forums? And how do those forums rank for their targeted keywords? One thing is for sure, limited signatures will help keep the people looking for signature spam out of your forum