can this affect google page rank? lets say I own a domain such as digitalpoint.com and a forum on a subdomain say forums.digitalpoint.com. Both the main domain and the subdomain have google pageranks. However, Google considers both the domain and the subdomain as the same domain and hence treats them as the same. If i allow users to use signature links on the forum will that affect the pagerank of the forum and the main domain? I read a post here on DP where someone was complaining about this. For example if users use adult signature links then that can dragstically affect your pagerank. What is your opinion on this?
It will effect just the forums PR. if you have links that lead to so called 'bad' sites then google will treat your site bad for that link. even qustionable language or copyright violations could do this
Allowing do-follow sig links "might" result in drop in PR. But if you have something good like DP then don't worry about the drop, you'd be having more threads and incoming links than outgoing links. DP allows do-follow links and its PR varies between 6 and 7 [I've never seen PR5 for DP]
Signature links from forums like dp do not contribute significantly to boost your PR but something is better than nothing. Apart from the small push, it adds to your traffic.
Yes, it will affect the PR, but in the other hand, it will make your forum grows. If you have good rules to avoid spam, it will be a good idea to allow do follow links in signatures. Just look this forum.
They might help a little bit if they are passing juice at least from some high PR pages on that particular forum