I've been a member of the siccness.net/vb forums for many years now. I have over 1000 comments with a signature that includes a link to my website, but when I do a backlink check nothing ever appears from this well known forum. My only guess is that they have the dofollow turned off? Do you think they have this feature turned off on purpose? Is there a reason forums are set to NoFollow? I'm thinking of contacting the owner of the forum and ask him to convert it. Is this a hard process or does it just take the click of a button? I beielve they're using the vbulletin forum software. This is a link to the forum I'm referring to. http://www.siccness.net/vb
There is probably many good reasons he has signatures set to nofollow. I have my largest forum set the same way to prevent spam and loss of PR. However I allow follow for natural links in posts. Doubtful the admin of siccness will alter his sites policy over this.
you need to register to access the internal pages. but just look at the source code of a page where you have your signature and look for your url, then check for nofollow
As pointed by Tutors_UK, this site does not allow non members to see thread contents so google can't see them either so it can't see your signature as well so it is not in google. Log off and browse the site as a "guest" and you'll see what he means.
Ahh! So thats the problem. I had no idea that if the site does not allow non members to see thread contents, then google spiders can't see them, which is why I don't get any backlinks from my signature. Damn!
Even if Google doesn't spider the links you can still benefit from natural traffic to your sites by people in the forum. It takes just a few seconds to add a signature and well...over the years you may get hundreds of visits from them. While Google indexed links are great...they are not the only way to increase traffic. Links are too often discounted over PR or nofollow. You need to broaden your definition of a quality link.
In the same context, if I am operating a forum (powered by phpBB) and I wish to enable or disable DO FOLLOW links what do I need to do? might be a silli question but its my honest ignorance. Would be grateful for your help!
search for the URL tag in one of the php scripts (depends on your version) and add or remove "nofollow" from the href link. I don't allow any external urls in the signature, but do allow follow in posts.
Is there an easy way to do this in the control panel? How would you also not allow any external urls in the signature, but do allow follow in posts?