Letting people link back in the signature a plus or minus long term? I bet this site just loves to find the quality links in the signatures here and back link them to increase rank and new keywords all the time am I right? I also bet alot of these sites in the signatures that are not doing so hot must be hurting this site also? Would google frown on this activity? The reason I am asking this is because I am itching to remove the rules ban on my forum at chilltoday.com of posting a signature??? The forum is brand new and just one part of the site. I want to figure this out before it bites me in the butt. PS looking for Mods also.
Well a forum which is doing well in search engines and if out there u have a signature link it does help. Take dp for example. Signature Links at dp do help a lot..
Well I just changed the rules to allow linking in the signature I will tell you how it goes in a month.
Generally this will also encourage more users to sign up with you and become active within your forums.
I guess signature will only send you more traffic than a backlink.. But definitely it will be added as your backlink.. because once I checked my site backlink I can see a lot of backlink in DP.
I do agree that a good linking in the signature will give a great help for explanation and communication.
I personally recommend putting no follows in the forum links - it reduces the time wasted on the management of spam posts and ensures you don't link out from your site to somewhere "bad" in Google's eyes