A large number of the links google is displaying to our sites are from links in sig files from forums. Yes I know the link: thing is BS these days... I wonder if they already or at some point in the foture will de-value links from sig files in forums. I mean I know there is no pr benefit but the anchor text must help. Anyone notice any real power behind links in their sig files, e.g. when you change the links from one thing to another how have the serps responded?
I don't think it's very useful for the SERPs because they come from the same domain, but I heard some websites get PR 6 only by posting a lot on one forum. It seems that Google doesn't devalue links much in terms of PR value.
do the links have to have an anchor tag? or is forum pseudo-code (i.e. [http] [/http]) converted to an anchor in the background?
I have been thinking of doing a test on this, I am going to make a new page that has no ibl to it from the rest of my site or any other site and just use ibl from forum sigs and see what happens. Does this sound like a logical test? any other thoughts?
I've done it, I got PR3 and i'm #1 for the term I use in my anchor text (it's not competitive at all, but it helps).
Hi everybody. I do not think that the sig links have a great anchor text value. I had some slightly competetive terms supported on forum anchor tests only, they did well to aprul or may, but dropped lately. As for PR itself, it is still usefull.
Personally, I think the links in forum signatures count just as much as if it was on another page. I think the issue of it not being overall that important is probably right though simply because of how many other links (internal and external) any one forum page has. There could be 200 links on a single page, so whatever value it has is divided by how many total links there are on the page.
I agree. I've seen sigs work pretty well in general, but a nice link from somewhere where there's only 4-5 other links on the page is much better.
They dropped. there was a big discussion about this in weproworld and everebody including myself were aruing with Harvey that they works. But he was right, exactly that time all my terms supported by forum links dropped. By the way, I. Brian somwhere published an article about this. He said that he has been collecting thousands of forum links since summer 2003 and they did well untill approx April 2004. Also, I have been observing that links from small dirs (GPR 1 or 0 at the page) works much better than forum links (some forums have GPR 3, 4 even 5 at the page). But this may be due to the unique IP factor.
I ran this test as part of the Search Engine Reverse Engineering Project. You can review the test results yourself at Do forum message body links help PageRank and SERPS? and Do forum signature links help PageRank and SERPS? The test were fairly conclusive in proving that both forum signature links and forum message body links have been devalued 100%, both for PR and for keyword relevance.
Traffic Sig links do pass PR though, I've seen it in my own and other tests. Do they help placement in the serps? I have no idea.