I've been noticing people's signature links at the major SEO forums more and more lately, especially when I ran this search - mesothelioma seo forum thread reply. That's a disturbing number of results and scanning through the first few pages, it looks like a lot of people are outing their clients (or their own sites) with a much higher risk than reward.
I often imagine myself as a search engineer or as a competing SEO for my sites or those of my clients. In both cases, it's far too easy to identify the SEO behind the site, and thus gain (in the case of a competitor) a great advantage or (in the case of a search engineer) to apply some nasty manual penalties. The good side is that a few folks from the forum might be interested enough to click the link and see your page, but it's probably not very topically focused towards SEO, so CTR and conversion is going to be horribly low. It's also my opinion that any link from forums like Cre8, SEOChat, SEW or WebProWorld is going to be viewed very, very skeptically by the major SEs. I'm not conspiracy-theory minded enough to say it could hurt you, but it certainly isn't boosting your ranking for anything competitive.
It seems to me that a lot of relatively intelligent and otherwise worldly SEOs are making a particularly uwise move in posting their URLs and targeted kws for the world to see. I'd urge anyone who is to reconsider - forum signatures should target the forum readers; link popularity is not the goal.
You are 100% right. People think that the weak backlink from a forum will help them. For a long time i have been under the belief that you should post relevent sigs in relevent forums.
Why identify the site as one associated with seo? Probably becuse people dont think.
Your post is really useful! Thanks a lot!
A great post!
Thanks!
but how to know that i'm dealing with a nofollow forum ?
is there a methode to do so ?
personally i use my blog Portable apps and games as a signature on many forums without knowing are they nofollow or not
I personally have nothing against creating links via forum signatures. I think it doesn't make sense as a link-building tactic however, it is effective to drive traffic to your site and get effective conversions. This is what I think SEO is now about.
If you're creating valuable content on the net, you might as well link back to your site, those are my 2 cents at least.
That's what so odd to me - there are quite a few talented, smart SEOs out there who still use sig links. It must just be a matter of not thinking it through - like Mick said.
I agree. It's in bad taste to have irrelevant forum signature links and you're probably not going to see any return in the SERPs.
If your SEO strategy calls for such measures then you probably have more problems then this one anyway.
Especially as the signature links at Cre8asite don't pass on any PR. ;-)
>If your SEO strategy calls for such measures then you probably have more problems then this one anyway.
Spot on. If your link development strategy has forum sigs as a part of it you are probably in trouble.
Beyond what sanity said, it's more than just sig links, there are very few links on cre8asite that pass on PR, and it's not blocked by using nofollow either ;)