I noticed almost everybody has a link in their signature, pointing to money making schemes or game sites. My understanding of basic SEO technique is that links should be between sites with similar topics. How does the google search engine treat links from this specific forum(s) to other sites? What is the relevancy of the links, as seen by the google algorithim?
I consider that signature links in forums help to drive traffic to your website and also fast indexing of your website as forums are regularly crawled by serach engines.
They bring in decent amount of traffic if its of related niche and also if your link looks catchy. Sig links from dp also count as backlinks.
DP has a lot of members and all have their own niche so if people like a link in the siggy they visit it also if they are interested they can network with the site's owner and not to forget google bot practically sleeps with DP in that process we also get our sites indexed hehe _
Thats why I only use relevant websites in my signature, plus it's common belief that forum signature links are naturally devalued by search engines. Not to mention that since almost everyone uses them it really dilutes the outbound link value of the links on that thread. It is good for traffic, but would still need to be someone relevant to drive the most traffic.
The number of outbound links on every page is high. But still these links are good as it bring some traffic + help in being crawled more often by search engines