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People like John Scott and myself have both long noticed the advantages of forums and signature backlinks.
However, I'm personally moving to the opinion that they serve a very limited usefulness.
As forums tend to be link rich - not just other sigs, but also all the buttons, link tree, and other such, means that PR transfer will be very small.
Add to that the fact that most forum threads are going to be low PR anyway.
And then factor in that most threads are not necessarily going to be "on topic" - if Google is able to distinguish that to any degree.
In simple terms, forum signature links are a nice perk. But there are not to be relied upon for any significant PR transfer. Anchor text can be a particularly useful issue, but if you check out the Florida thread by Phil C, you'll see a particular common conjecture among the SEO community is that this is one aspect of a number of features that may well have been factored down by Google. The drop in your site PR from 4 to 3 is a strong suggestion of that.
So sig links are nice, but don't put too much expectation on them.
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