Because it shows up does not mean its value is anything to brag about ;-). Alot of times the lower quality links show up in the google backlink command and not the highest ones although it is variety.
I don't think it hurts at all. Because if it did, you could link your competitors website 500 times in a forum and damage its rankings. Also forums are the places that people discuss what they find on the web as well as other places. If google devalues links in forums, then what happens to the democratic nature of the web that they love to promote? Pretty soon the only link that wont get devalued is a link on CNN. Unless of coarse CNN starts selling footer links. Im sure that googs relizes that they could take devaluation of links too far. Penalizing legitimate websites and webmasters will only hurt them in the end. Bison
I agree that it can't hurt you but what value it does bring is it worth it? Google has dis valued forum links because they are way too easy to get and there are so many. Your also taking this too far. Google disvalues common/potentially spammy link places such as forums, blog comments(most are nofollow now), guestbooks, directories etc etc. Anything that is really easy to get. That is WHY they are better than MSN and yahoo. Thats like saying a car is a car. I sure am not trading my Porsche for your 4x4 jeep.
In my experience, signature links from related forums is very valuable but i can say how much it is valuable at this stage..
I was a post whore an a forum that got hacked last year. I had 10,000 posts each with a link to my live journal. In this last cycle of google updates I dropped from a PR5 to a PR4 (in a few datacenters a PR3) so I'm thinking that sig linkage helps...at least some. Then again, google did some pretty strange things on this run *shrug* I do wonder though how much of a difference it makes from unrelated sites... like I only have one site to link to, or at least one niche market to link to. Does my signature link here help other then to show you guys what I have? Would you putting your SEO site in a sig on an Occult site help you? Does it affect SERP or PR? Q
There are fringe benefits of having a link on a webmaster forum. I think we are in related niches. But as for direct effect in the SE's - I do think that only works when the link is at least related. and even then... I mean. I have an SEO link here, but I'm getting zilch SE traffic to my site for SEO (in English). That would be because I do absolutely nothing other than post here to promote it. Of course webdesign and SEO are such competitive topics... it's one reason why I'm not even trying very hard.
i think it is help too much twice. 1-direct links to your site. 2-all your posts raise your profile pr. "i got 2 until now"
Its effective on new sites. At least, the search engines can visit and crawl your website faster. High ranked sites like Digital Point, Digg etc can get you amazing results.
Why do you make difference between forums and other sites? Google values any link visible for its robots and there is hardly a difference between forum signature link and link in comments of some blog.
I do agree that signature links is more important to new sites, I got pr 3 and 4 on my 4mos old blog sites
Sorry mate but please do a little bit of research before posting. Google values links very very differently. None two are alike. Forum links are different from other forms of backlinks. However the difference between forum links and blog comments is nearly all blogs are NOFOLLOW while there are a good many forums that aren't. Google does not value ANY link.
He is saying sth different! He is not talking about the nofollow case. (I saw forums have no-follow signatures too.) IMO he is only saying that "there is no evidence for saying forum signature links are detected by google and devalued". I agree to this sentence. If you have evidences please share with us.. I know forums which give me PR5 backlinks and having only a few (generally only mine) signatures in one thread. (Not like webmaster forums) (And i know having a link on a high PRed page may not return a great value because there are other parameters. So please do not tell me "do research" too )
You misunderstood... I am not necessarily saying forums have lower value links in and of itself. The problem is that most forums have tons of outbound links to sites from toothpicks to cars so the relevancy is missing and because of this the value is greatly dis-credited. There is evidence to support that Google dis-values a bunch of links to irrelevant sources. Hope that explains it.
It would be illogical for the SE's to give signatures significant weight. As far as traffic is concern, they could be a goldmine.
I think if you post in high quality forums than the links you get are good. If not at least you get click through traffic. Most of the good forums make you wait a while before they let you post your sig. I like this forum because of that. I have not make enough posts here yet to put my sig. I post only when I have something beneficial to add to the thread. Frank
Yes, i agree to this. Relevancy and number of links should be important and can be detected by google easily.