I noticed that the high ranking sites in Google for my main keyword have a lot of backlinks coming from forums. This doesn't surprise me. Think about it - the closest that Google can get to "word of mouth" is when people post a link to a forum. That's the most genuine endorsement of a site that you can find. I'm not talking about sigs either. In the same way that Google can easily discount links or give low link juice from a site containing the word "directory", it is surely not difficult for Google to realise when a link is made in the body of a post, as opposed to a signature that appears hundreds of times in a forum. I also noticed that the forum itself does not need to be relevant. One of my niches is "premature ejaculation", a general mens health niche. I noticed that a lot of inbound links come from forums that have nothing to do with mens health or health generally. They come from regular forums, say in the "general chat" area. It seems that the best way is to get a conversation started on the topic of your keyword and get many other people involved in the conversation and drop your link somewhere in the page. The longer the thread then the more that Google will love this page and give you good link juice. So I am thinking of paying for forum posts to establish a niche specific post and insert my link in there. Ideally, a deep link. What do you think of this strategy? Has anyone done anything like this before or found similar properties of forum posts? Would love to hear your input.
You've just described "Forum marketing" in a Nut shell The pros are that you can get those backlinks plus the forum traffic The Cons are often you cannot place live links inside your post until you have made a minimum amount of posts (like here at DP) If you are not careful about how you post, the Mods may realize what you are up to and quickly Ban your account (like here at DP) However if you add true value to the form you will still be able to get a nice amount of traffic through your signature link
It will be hard to put links in the actual post with out making it looking like spam and getting banned
just because high ranking sites have lot of backlinks form forum doesn;t mean that thats the only link building methods they use. its easier to buy few heavy poster's forum signatures and get 10s of thousands of backlinks. if you consider the link value from forum signature, they dont count much if you have few forum links. to be benefited somewhat form forum signature, you need ton of them. DP for example have 20 posts per page and each member can have upto 4 signature. with the external links form adsense, there are LOTS of external links from a single page. when there are so many external links fma page, you dont really get much of a link juice. also, all the new threads has no PR and not all the threads stay on the front page long enough for google to even index them. i'm not saying forum signatures are useless, they can be somewhat helpful but you will need ton of signature and have a long term plan. and just the forum signature itself will not rank a competitive site high, you wil need to do other forms of link building as well
You all misunderstand me. First of all, yes, I think forum sigs are not good for link juice. Google can easily spot a signature and devalue the link immediately. And I am not talking about classic forum marketing either - which is usually (1) find a forum in your niche and (2) build a reputation before (3) placing some links. What I propose is to simply pay others to create threads that are relevant to your main keyword and then drop your URL in the thread. You don't need to use a niche-specific forum. My research indicates that the thread needs to be optimised but the overall forum does not need to be relevant.
@rolf, you have a nice niche in that it's a worldwide issue that has relevance to almost all of the adult internet population (don't forget that frustrated women can research this subject also for solutions). Methinks you would do good to create your own forum on this issue and with time and promotion YOU will reap the full benefits of all the traffic, especially if it is hosted within your domain name.
I could see those people getting their accounts banned in a hurry. Imagine starting a thread about casino gambling while on a weight loss forum and then dropping a link to your Gambling website...
What he means though is if that weight loss forum has a "general chat" area where you can talk about anything, that is where he would try and drop his link to his site. In theory it could work out well, I just have a feeling that a lot of the posts could be deleted or the link will be removed by the mods or even worse the account just gets banned.
The best thing to do, is to find some old member of the forum who wants to make some cash and pay him for placing a link in his signature.
I agree with you. It is better to start a new thread rather than post after others' post. If you start a thread , the page title are more related to the keywords you mention in your post. Forum links helps your pages to be indexed, ranked. it also help to quantity of backlinks which is still important for yahoo bot. It is still an excellent way to promote site.