Could / does / might a link in a post or signature on a SEO forum red flag your site with search engines? Obviously not too big a penalty, but it's not too hard to work out that webmasters in SEO forums are open to having the spotlight on them?...
I've seen mention that mentioning "Search Engine Optimization" or even just "Search Engine" can penalize the current page. However having a link in this forum to your page can only increase your search results. What you are asking about (It's a very good question) is the passing on of negative pagerank. It seems extremely remote that Google or any other search engine would allow one website's contents to negatively affect another's. If it did then we would see numerous slanderous sites trying to drive down the reputation of other sites.
No! Many pepole think that Google may not be valuing links from forums as highly as they did in the past, but I'm sure they are not "red flagging" any site simple because the web master belong to a forum. In the McDar experiment we have just decided to remove the approx. 5,000 sig links that pointed to our test page to see if there is any significant change to the ranking of that page in the SERPs. But none of us expect the page to improve for having done this. We just want to test and see if it falls very far as a result.
of course they don't penalize sites for having been linked to in forums! think about that for a second, about what that'd mean. if you could drop a site in the SERPs by linking to them for forums, wouldn't we all be linking to our competitors, not ourselves? if google did this, why would we still be linking to our own sites? and most importantly.. WHY would google do this? they don't, and never will.
Thanks, that clears it up. Um - another question. I have three sites (which link to eachother), and I was wondering if listing all three in my signature file would clarify for search engines that they all belong to the one owner? Thus possibly detracting from the value of those links. I have read about the triangular linking system and know that is one way to safeguard against it, but I'm wondering if the mention in sig files may effect the sites in any way?
again: if it did, wouldn't we all be linking to three random sites we're compteting against, get google to penalize them, and thereby move up three spots in the serps? with very few exceptions, there's virtually nothing you can do off of a site that will have a negative impact on it.
Of course not. I agree with disgust said. If it is then we would creating links to competitor's sites not ours.
I'm very glad I found this forum, I am learning a lot from people who really know what they are doing.