The links in your DP signature.

Hi, I'm sorry if my question is really basic, but here it goes:

As you know, when you change your DP signature, it changes in all your posts retroactively.
That means that if you have thousands of posts in DP, when you add a link to your signature, suddenly thousands of links to your site appear at the same time.
I've heard that google will penalise you if thousands of links to your site appear too quickly, so will this affect my sites?

Thanks a lot, and sorry again if my question is too basic.

 

I have done it many times and I have never had any issues before.

 

Not true any way

 

I haven't gotten any backlinks from this forum from my sig links anyway

 

Better one: Are you saying it is enough to point with signature to any site, to destruct every seo efforts of the owner? That would be a powerful weapon against competitors!

 

THis shan't be a way.. as grg pointed out you can start eliminating competitor rather making your work better. which is definitely Google won't want to be.

 

Do worry ... possible most of the old threads were de-indexed already.

 

Oh? Results 1 - 100 of about 1,070,000 from digitalpoint.com
Threads: 881,002, Posts: 8,075,403, Members: 180,260, Active Members: 54,394

 

Looks to me like out of 8 million posts, only 1 million of them are indexed. I wonder if it's the most recent 1 million.

 

The point is, the thousands of links is from and only from 1 site, so it will not a problem.

 

But the thing is that once you change your signature links and all posts follow suit, that doesn't mean that you will get penalized. It's because the each individual posts with new sig links has to be crawled again so that bots can identify the new urls inserted.

 

Google only gives value to a small percentage of links from the same site. You may see about 10% of your signature links show up in your back links. Signatures are better to expose your site to potential traffic than for PR purposes. It is also great for getting a new site indexed.

As far as the question of how would you know if Google penalized you for the links, you really would have no way of knowing unless your only links are DP signatures.

 

Ive seen someone mention before that if you build up your posts and have never used the sig links, then you drop in a sig of your own or rent one out that if its never been used before then you wont get any links from it up till your first use of the sig link.

So if you built up 1000 posts here, never used the sigs ever then drop in a sig link then make 20 posts, you will have 20 sig links showing here at DP and not 1020.

 

..... talking about "forum threads"

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php

Results 1 - 10 of about 505,000 from forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php. (0.02 seconds)

My main point is ... it is ok to change signatures for all forums not only dp.

 

There's way more pages then 8 million, there's all the archive versions, print thread versions, showpost URL's, members profile pages and so on. So from all the URL's indexed, not all of them are even posts.

 

Thanks a lot for all the great answers to my question. Not worried anymore

 

It is true - but Google is not so serious about forum links - so it is ok no matter how often you change it...