Posting URLs on Forums

Hi
I'm a new member so pls be patient with me!

I posted a question about a site yesterday without the URL. One of the contributors suggested that I should post the URL so that it can be investigated better. So I did.. and then again on another thread.

I wanted to know if there is a negative effect to posting a website's URL on the forums as I read that this can be classified as spam. Thanks for any input.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid!

 

It's not spam here if you are genuinely asking. Some other forums will delete it right away.

 

Thanks for that, I meant if SEs regard it as spam and therefore penalise the site. Sorry for not making it clear.

 

No, you will not be penalized by the SEs for it. Signature links tend to do nothing for ranking (although great for indedxing) but they certainly won't hurt you.

I will add though that there are a minority that believe the opposite. Although I don't agree, hopeful they post their reasoning in this thread.

 

If you're really worried and don't mind risking some lazy people not helping you you can always post the url like: [no-url]www.your[broken]domain.com[/no-url] that way it won;t go live but a quick copy paste and deletion of the [broken] part will get us there anyway.

 

I think you can also do it like just blazemp.com without www, and it won't be a link.

 

It won't be a link but surprisingly enough, Google will crawl it.

 

aha. Thanks for the info.

 

a bold question comes to my mind, what if you have a rel=nofollow link with anchortext msn.com, would it be crawled?

 

I haven't ever seen nofollow cause a page to not get indexed. I know its supposed to be that way but it seems to be a PR tool (Public Relations).

Some say it only stops PR (PageRank) not indexing, but even that doesn't seem to be the case.

 

Are you asking can forum links have a negative impact on your rankings? If so, no.

 

@jfs1

I don't think so. if s.o. like U has over 6000 postings on this forum I think the signature links helps a bit for ranking. or am I wrong?

 

I have experimented with my sig to see what happens if I change it to target a fairly easy keyphrase. It seems to have no measurable effect.

However I can point it to a brand new site and it gets fully indexed within 2-3 days with no other links. Sometimes 10's of thousand of pages.

I tend to think sig links are viewed similar to sitewides

 

ok that is interesting. but how can the bot differentiate between normal links and sig links?

 

I find this particular discussion interesting because I do a lot of forum posting on a lot of different forums and often use it as a means of advertising sites. Not necessairly from an SE point-of-view but for direct targeting of visitors.

However, I am interested in your thoughts on this YFS1... Do you think links in the post itself are treated differently than signature links or the same?

I have had sites get indexed from vbulletin sigs/profile where I never even posted, because it shows up in the membership page.