I've seen conflicting information regarding forum signatures

Hey folks,

I've been reading through this forum and searching in the history to learn more about link development via forum signatures and I've seen conflicting information, sometimes in the same thread!

Some say it helps with PR.

Some say it helps with SERP.

Can anyone, with 95% confidence, say which one it is please??

Thanks in advance.

 

forum signatures dont help much in terms of link building. if you are using it for promotional purposes, then thats different but forum signature links have very little value. in terms of PR, you will not get much PR benefit as 99.9% of hte forum threads will not have any PR and the thread where your post in on with your sig will sink into the inner pages before google even has a chance to crawl it for the second time.

 

It doesn't sound like it's hugely worth the effort, other than for a little extra exposure from people who read it on the forum.

 

Do not waste your time, Google knows the difference between a forum sig and a real link.. They will not help you rank on any terms and will do very little to your page rank since very few threads carry any page rank juice. Look for inlinks from high pr blog posts

 

They will be some benefit of course but it is discounted compared with other methods. A friends site ranks well in a competitive niche based almost exclusively on blog and forum commenting, though this been done consistantly for the last couple of years.

 

On some level I agree with sultanofseo, but he states that Google don't have a chance to index the links (threads), which isn't really true. Google is fast nowadays and this isn't really the problem. Neither that 99.9 % of the threads don't have any PR (cause they DO), but that they carry so little, that it isn't worth it. In terms of link building, forum prosting becomes useful when you can get your link in a sticky thread or in a thread which category isn't updated too often, so the thread stays at the first page.

 

read my post again if you are confused about what i said. i didnt say google will not get a change to "index" but what i said is google will not get a chance to "crawl" most of the threads for the "second" time. there is a HUGE difference.

so you are saying 100% off all forum threads have its own PR? pick 100 threads from this forum randomly for example and see how many threads you find having its own PR

 

I'm sorry if I misread your post...
Yes, if they are indexed they will carry a certain amount of PageRank. That is a part of the anatomy.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

 

it suppose to help the serp, but still they have little value so you will need like 10 thouands of them to see the effect.

 

Depends on the forum. DP seems to not help that much, but other forums I post on have PR of 4-5 fairly consistently for older threads. Now if G is able to take that into account or not, I'm not sure.

I do know that backlinks with anchor text are good things no matter where they come from!

 

Although sig links do almost nothing for PR and/or SEO, I get a decent amount of hits (targeted traffic) just from my sig links in tech forums. Since I run a tech site I am getting targeted traffic, not just any old traffic. Bounce rate is very very low from these clicks too.

 

I have to agree with bretthexum. My forum signatures generate a decent amount of hits (targeted traffic) as well. At the end of the day, what counts to me are conversions - net profit, and signature links do help.

 

Try an experiment. I have, nothing but forum links for a site and I get decent serps and even some PR.

Dont expect much PR though.

 

When it comes to getting backlinks or any form of link development,
you must remember don't over complicate things.

Remember KISS (Keep it simple stupid). As Matt Cutt's once said "A Link is A Link".
Just focus on getting more than your competitor, once you're in a position to outrank them,
THEN look at how many high PR links you need to overtake them in the SERP's.

Basically yes get your link in forum signatures, get your link anywhere you can!

 

I think it helps, just not in a significant way.

But I haven't done any tests to prove/disprove this thoery. But I figure, can't hurt right?

 

Exactly. If you are going to post anyway, might as well have a signature and get a few hits every now and then

 

sorry guys - I like to believe that sig links don't help - but I have tested this. I've had sites that moved up without any help from web 2.0 props.

 

Signature links helps in building backlinks. Google prefers to see the links form different domain name. so forums helps in backlinks as well as traffic. We dont get much benefit in factors of PR or serp.

 

I agree with the above.

 

Forum sigs are not going to have a huge impact on serps or pr. You should concentrate on doing some research on the different "types" of links you should get in your effort to move up the serps. Understanding the methodology behind link diversification will help you develop a better strategy that will yield better long term results for both pr and serps.

Beyond that, tt certainly can't hurt to have forum signatures but from what I read in your post if you're looking for help in serps and pr diversify the links that you're trying to acquire and in time you'll get closer to the results you want to see.