I learned of a mod recently for vBulletin that gave all external links "ref="nofollow"" tags so search engines wouldn't crawl them. The mod said this stopped "our PR from leaking to other sites," but my question is, does having people's links on your forum signatures and posts do bad, or good for your SEO/PR? Especially if the links are on people's signatures, where they are repeated over and over. If its bad, would this ref=nofollow mod be good to install in terms of SEO/PR?
Every backlinks you can get to your website is good, no matter what... But you should try to focus on quality ones instead of quantity only, and the to to target your keywords after doing some in-depth research... then make sure to target many anchors instep not to look as your trying to spam the search engines However, you as a website owner have no control over other websites that might be willing to link to you instead you have control over your own website so try not to link to bad neighborhoods and properly start using "NoFollow" tag on some of your outbound links
yes you can get backlinks from a same site or different sites.... but its a lot better to have it on diff. sites
It sounds like you are talking about this from the perspective of a forum or blog owner. Having many external links on your website can negatively affect PR & SEO. Each page with external links sends some of your internal PR to these websites instead of to other internal pages on your website. So you retain less PR to send back to other pages. Having so many external links can be bad for seo, particularly if your website has not established much trust with Google yet. Older established sites like DP can still get rankings despite excessive external links because they have built up enough trust with Google. They have been around for a long time, they have a lot of quality unique content and they have many quality backlinks. These excessive external links can dillute the apparent theme of your website. If any of these external links are bad neighbourhood or spammy websites they could even get your website penalized. Lots of off topic external links is usually a bad thing. By using a rel="nofollow" (rel not ref) attribute on those links you do retain more PR and help your seo. You also get much less spam. Unfortunately it some cases it limits the amount of content people are willing to contribute. So it is a trade off.
So you all saing that we should not link exchange with related niche websites ( not more than like ...10... ) and to keep our PR for the other pages of our website?
Thanks for this. I decided to add a "links only viewable to registered users" mod so that this would stop, and encourage registration. Good information though, thanks again, and to everyone who helped!
The more links on one page, like for example this page, the more diluted the page rank will be if given any at all. That is why forums paginate threads into pages, so it isn't FULL of backlinks.
Sticking up for backlinks on same forum is killing your SERP's Better try to post on different forums from your niche. .