Well funny enough, I am the type of person that always prefers to participate in a community then to just try and get my site's link on another forum. So long story short, yesterday I started a small job for someone to get their site link onto forums via signatures and I found a great do-follow forum that dealt with digital photography. I signed up and started the process of creating a nice profile. Bear in mind I designed a small avatar for the user, and created a nice little signature with a link to his site in it since it seemed everyone had signatures that pointed to their own sites. So I looked around this digital photography forum and saw that I could add something useful to the general discussion and tips area. So off I go to write this great article which I called, 'My Digital Camera Buying Guide.' I then went on to write a second article about the equipment used and posted that as my second thread. Then I went browsing through their forum and responded to one thread where someone asked, 'What size would you display your pictures on your website.' Wow...I had a long hard think (not really) and answered that usually I have sizes ranging from 800 px to 1500px max depending on whether I wanted to show my picture big or small and said it is up to personal preference. That was the third thing I did. The last post I did was similar to that, I just responded to a general question asked by someone. After doing the two threads and two posts, I thought to myself I needed to get out and do some shopping with which I proceeded to check out and went shopping. I didn't go back to the site till this morning to see how many views/replies it got when I received this... You are Banned. Date when ban will be lifted: Never. Reason: SPAM Now WTF! I will say that again. Since when does 2 threads and two posts qualify as spam? So basically I decided there and then that it isn't worth it to get banned for no damn reason and realised that if people want the short cut to just getting their links onto forums... then they have to genuinely participate in that forum/community. Funny thing is, lots of methods discussed on this forum and by people that say, get your link into do-follow blogs and use anchor texts etc. Let me tell you...it doesn't work anymore. It is so outdated. You will only get your post deleted. I have several blogs and get tons of people that try these same techniques. I go onto my blog everyday and report posts like that as spam and through personal experience have seen that other people are starting to moderate their blogs or even do not allow links in the posts which flags it as spam. So how do people justify link building techniques like these when even I do not approve? Personally, my advice is if you are a website owner and want people to genuinely like your site and buy your products, then you need to build relationships and stop shooting yourself in the foot with wasted techniques that do not work. Most forum owners know about these things, so it doesn't work anymore.