Maybe if DP was buying links then it would be another story but just linking to it or post here will not drop your PR.
Well, thats correct to some extent. any out going link can cause you a drop in SERP. No matter where you are pointing to.
i dont think that if you are linking to digitalpoint like this thread for example will hurt your rank why it will hurt your ranking digitalpoint will help your ranking
Nobody said anything about PR. The fact is that I had a post that didn't rank for it's own name for months. The day after I removed the link to DP its rankings came back. www.digitalpoint.com has the penalty and is classed as a bad neighbourhood, the forums are still fine.
last week i have posted the Theory of PR penality , caused by Digitalpoint coops . I had an experience with this . This penamity has affected many sites ( i know 3) putting DP coops in their sites. i wonder if this have any relation with this subject . I posted this because i saw DP link on my site many time ( in the footer of my site)
my sig links in DP forum never hurt my G results (any) but usually helped so far! proof: I was ranked #1 in G for a major xmas keyword for MANY weeks last xmas - dispite the fact that I used the same page as my siglink during pre-/xmas weeks. and I rank top 10 in many of my siglinks-pages - related keywords
I disagree with them and i dont think they are trustable source. also it could be the way that mad4 said. Forums is diferent from mainsite so links from forums will not harm your ranking.
I am so disturbed today after I read this article: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/linking-to-digital-point-does-harm-rankings/
You should qualify your post as a link TO digital point - which is different from having links FROM digital point... I think that reciprocal linking has a negative effect - is this correct?
That settles my confusion and despair. We all love DP because of lively interaction and quality information plus stranger's help we get from time to time. If Google couldn't trust DP, who else will it trust?
I read that Google are not counting recipricol links as carrying as much weight as they used to. A simple link from 1 site (1 way) surely cannot harm your site.
That's ridiculous. If it was a bad neighborhood, Google would have reduced its PR to 0, or penalized it heavily (maybe down to PR of 2). Not that PR is the end-all metric, but it does have some value. Currently digitalpoint.com has a PR of 7. Not exactly consistent with a bad neighborhood. Say that all you want, but the fact is, PR is related. A low PR can indicate something about a bad neighborhood (although low PR doesn't mean a site is a bad neighborhood, a bad neighborhood site will not have high PR.) Rankings shuffle all the time, and it's important not to draw conclusions from the daily rank shuffle. It's clear that you are jumping to conclusions. There are many reasons why a page might not rank for it's own name, the most common being a lack of unique title and description tags (triggers duplicate content filter) or lack of incoming links, but there are many more. Saying that linking to Digital Point will hurt your rankings is ridiculous. I have several pages that link to DP (and not just the forums) and they rank just fine.
There is, but it depends how Google decides to view bad neighbourhoods. Will they penalise you for linking to a website in a bad neighbourhood, or for linking to a site that links to a site in a bad neighbourhood? Put it this way, how many people are linking out to bad neighbourhoods in their signatures? This has got to be fluid, but there will always be a certain percentage. But what percentage does it take to set off alarm bells? I doubt that the forums will ever be considered a bad neighbourhood as they stand now. There are just so many links coming in and going out. But I don't think it's a black-and-white issue, there are shades of grey and those depend on what members put in their signatures. This is one forum where signature links are often traded, and if that gets out of hand things could change.