Forum signatures in forums like DP are only helping on short term. In long term you'll be even punished for using them. why: - A patent claims that the age of a link is important, short term links are considered bad. - I've did some testing with this (now testing with affiliate marketing), results are: - short term boost - long term punishment
that's all well and good but essentially you've just told us your result, and not your testing process, so how can you guarantee this information?
That is your opinion. Maybe based on your results, but we need to know how you came to those results.
I've had one of my sites in my sig for two years - it's my 'baby', and the site I can experiment on as it's solely my own as opposed to sites I work on for other people. I've never seen any harm from it.
While I don't agree with this totally there could possibly be some bit of truth in your observations. If you ran a test on 1 site and saw a problem, I would ignore it. If you ran it on 10 sites and saw the problem in all 10 cases, I would start to question it. If you ran a test test on 30 or 50 sites and saw the problem in every case, I would believe it. I have heard Matt Cutts and respected SEOs say that too many low quality inbound links can cause issues w/ ranking. But I believe Matt and others were implying that if ALL of your links are cheap farmed links (forum sigs, blog comment posting, directory submissions, etc.) that it doesn't look natural and could detract from your overall rankings. You need some decent "natural" links mixed in as well so that your backlink profile looks natural and not totally artificial (self made). If such a ranking factor exists, I wouldn't think this is a penalty of any sort which would absolutely prevent your from ranking well. Just some ranking factor that if you score badly on can pull your rankings down. But it could likely be compensated for by scoring higher on other ranking factors, unlike penalties where NOTHING you can do can get you back on page 1 short of fixing the violation.
well, i cant believe it, perhaps u have been misguided and perhaps u r trying to do the same, =) regards,
Matt Cutts insinuated that google can differentiate link types. He didn't say what that meant exactly and it probably was an idle threat, but it created a bit of panic - obviously they know people are using links in forum sigs and blogrolls and comments but i doubt google will really penalize it. I don't think they have that kind of technology to instantly recognize and identify it - it would require tracking updates on lots of various scripts like vb and wordpress and ipb and phbb and keeping the algorithm up to date on where the signature field is located in each script. It's possible but highly impractical and tedious.
I never said that having tons of low quality links would lead to a penalty. In fact I said the exact opposite. I only said there might be a little truth in that such links might negatively impact rankings. But it would be VERY easy for Google to do this... It would not require tracking updates on lots of various scripts like vb and wordpress and ipb and phbb... they only need to understand is HTML. They never see server side scripting anyway. They can flag sites as "low quality" the same way they track site bans, penalties, etc... for the most part manually by flagging a site a certain way when their Quality Raters stumble on to them or when they are researching spam reports on the site. They would likely do it with Domain Trust or something very similar to it. Domain Trust can be affected by inbound links and outbound links to trusted and untrusted sites... Most SEOs agree that: - Links from trusted sites can effect your domain trust positively... - Links to untrusted sites (or better yet "bad neighborhoods" w/ negative trust) can effect your domain turst negatively... - Links to trusted sites can effect your domain trust positively... So why is it such a stretch to believe that: - Links from untrusted sites could very well effect your domain trust negatively... Perhaps Google might make the impact to your domain trust of these types of inbound links from untrusted sites and/or "bad neighborhoods" only effect the domain trust in a very minor way to prevent competitors from trying to Google Bowl you out of the SERPs. But enough of them may very well work. Over the past few years I've not only heard Cutts imply that LOTS of low quality inbound links will effect your site negatively... but other people at well respected SEO sites like Aaron Wall, the guys at SEOMoz, and others. Like I said in the previous post, I'm pretty confident that if you have a decent mix of normal trusted or semi-trusted links, it's not a problem but if you ONLY have inbound cheap links, these could be driving your domain trust into the negative. A few good inbound links will probably undo any negative effects of many low quality inbound links. All Google has to do is to get reports that site X is being abused by spammers to get backlinks or is a bad neighborhood for some reason. They'll review the site... and if they agree, they could simply flag that site as untrusted/negatively trusted or a bad neighborhood. All links from that site would suddenly switch to passing a small negative trust factor to sites it links to. Do you not think DP and other forums that allow DOFOLLOW sig links don't get reported to Google as being abused by spammers? They have moderators here, but the links get posted before moderation. The outbound links in peeps sigs here are pretty much unmoderated unless another subscriber reports someone. It's not like a moderated blog where the admin has to approve the links before they are published. Do you remember what happened to DOFOLLOW blogs? The engines created rel="nofollow" to fight spam AND prevent the blog from being penalized because of a comment pointing back to a bad neighborhood. Since links here are DOFOLLOW I could totally see G flagging them as untrusted or even slightly negative trusted should they get enough reports of abuse by spammers for backlinks. I'm not saying it IS happening, only that it is POSSIBLE that sig links from dofollow forums (much like dofollow blogs or other sites) if deemed a bad neighborhood or a common place abused by spammers for backlinks COULD be flagged by Google to pass your URL some small "negative" ranking factor value(s) like negative Domain Trust.
What an idiot. You really had to "quote" everything. Don't you have your own opinion? PS: The short-term vs long-term thing is just bullshit. Otherwise that idiot would come and post some proof here. But I guess we won't be seeing him very soon. Get a life newbie.