Value of Forum Link and Forum Sigs - Opinions

[GoldDust]

Originally Posted by Brian

When I was on the phpBB support team I had a link to my old website in my signature. I would post roughly 50+ times per day. And, John as my witness, that signature helped give my old site a PR8.

Nice when it was possible huh! Although that was alot more possible under the old google algo, that's alot different now though. Also, with the the latest Latent Semantic Indexing changes (math) I would assume link amount when only a few, are at times seen as more valuable than huge amount of links on same ip.

Basically, it's not how many links you have, but the quality of those links in terms of placment around topic content!

[realestate]

Once I received a typo subdomain link from a popular forum, and our site was number one for informationclearing. It disappeared in a few days.

[marthrock]

any time you're providing links within a site thats getting crawled, it can only be a positive, even more so if the site has a decent PR

[Padawan]

I agree with all the comments about sig links aiding search engines to find and crawl your site.

I have actually benefited traffic wise too - I have a relatively new site which I haven't optimised properly yet so forum traffic is a large (80%+) portion of my traffic, and has lead to decent sales too.

[Johan007]

Does not help my site (check out my bottom sign link).

[Web Gazelle]

I use forum sig links to help get sites spidered and indexed. I may also refer to one of those sites in my post so it is there if people want to see what I am talking about.

[Buskerdoo]

I noticed this thread is still going. Good comments. I to use them for quick spider (indexing) food. It's a light meal though.

[pinkfluffybunny]

This is from a competitor, But I gotta give him crefit he's almost as good as I am ...Bunnies should never be humble

"The Powerful Link Myth
Website owners were, and still are, scrambling for the all powerful backward link! They are in belief that a link from a highly ranked site will boost their ranking instantly.

As I have stated many times, you cannot fool the Search Engines. As always, the Search Engines caught up to this tactic of "buying your way to the top" and have since devalued it in their ranking system.

The Proof is in the Pudding

I did a test and purchased a link from a highly ranked, unrelated site. I did not develop any other links, nor did I work hard on building content. Granted the change in Pagerank was amazing - the site jumped from a miserable ranking of 2 to a 6! Wonderful? Not really.

While the all mightly green PageRank bar may have jumped, ranking for keywords did not. The site was still not ranked in the top 30 for any keyterms related to the site.

At the same time . I developed a content rich site and submitted it to the top 5 search engines. I had no inbound, or backlinks, and the results may surprise you.

The first green bar achievement was a respectible 4. But what really made the impact was the site was showing up in the Search Engines for keyterms relevant to the site. Traffic was increasing and the site was being spidered regularly.

Caution:

Don't be fooled by Link Brokers. When links develop naturally usually there is a more even distribution of low power links to high power links. If you buy nothing but high power links that will look abnormal.

This abnormality may cause a red flag with the Search Engines and cause your site not to rank as high. Powerful links do help, but it is far cheaper and more effective to manually build many low power links than to go after a single or few high power links. "