Thread: Sig Links | FACTS

Here's some information about signature links. In time, people are going to start asking about exactly how much they affect PR and whether 1000s are good for your site.

First of all I'll start with an expirement run by SEO expert, SweetFunny at DP forums.

SweetFunny created a brand new site with the name "SEO" in the URL. He added his site to his signiture on a few forums where his total post count amounted to ~18,000. This is 18,000 backlinks to his site (all forums were DOfollow). He noticed after a few months that his PR went from PR N/A to PR0. Of course, over time the PR of some of the threads he posted in with his signature may increase and therefore pass more Google juice but at the moment it seems that they do nothing.

Here is some information I have heard from a member at another webmater forum, I think SitePoint. Here's some great advice that he said:

"=> Any page that has a link to your site and is indexed and not intentionally blocking the link is a backlink.

=> Only nofollow links don't help with SERPS all others are useful to varying degrees.

=> Not all forums use nofollow.

=> How the searchengine spider know the link as a comment or forum signature? A link is just a link to the SE spiders.

=> Search engines aren't stupid. Indexing and organizing billions of pages everyday shows they have the ability to discern quite a bit about the pages they index.

=> Google will not penalize you for having signature links. If it did I'd be banned 100 times over.

=> Google doesn't recognize a page as a forum. They only see it has a page. It has no more or less weight then any other page.

=> If that page isn't relevant to your site, the links won't mean much. Plus with their being so many links on a forum page there will be little PR sent your way as well.

=> Duh. Why wouldn't I put my links in my sig? I don't post here for the signature links, though. I post to help others and learn and using my signature is a great bonus. Especially when you are approaching 19,000 posts.

=> Just keep in mind that although the quantity of backlinks may increase from forum sigs, the quality of backlinks you have won't has forum sig links aren't worth much to the search engines.

=> Forum signature links have little SEO value. The pages are usually off-topic, PR is diluted to the point of virtual uselessness, and you can be sure having 15,000 links from the same domain is devalued. Signatures are best used to drive traffic to your websites and hopefully from there you can get backlinks from other webmasters because they like your content.

=> Forum signatures and most directory links have extremely little SEO value. They're just about as low quality as it gets.

=> Forum signature links send almost no PR due to the low PR of the pages and countless links on them.

=> Forum signature links definitely are not quality links.

=> The links themselves don't have a lot of SEO value is the point. I get plenty of traffic from my sig as well. And if your sitepoint sig provides most of your traffic you really need to start promoting your website!

=> Forum sigs have very little value. But they do have some value. I wouldn't go joining lots of forums for the sake of getting your links in your sigs. It's not worth the effort. Participate in forums related to your topics and participate intelligently. Yes, you'll get some links out of it, but the effect they have from that perspective will be minuscule compared to the traffic you get from members who appreciate your intelligent posts and want to see what you've got going on.

=> For me forum sig links are a bonus for participating in a forum. It definitely isn't the reason why I join a forum and post.

=> Posting in forums for the sake of getting backlinks through signatures is a waste of time. The links have such little value that the ROI is just awful. But if you participate in forums then you should take advantage of your signature as you can get decent traffic and maybe even find others wanting to link to you because they like your site.

As far as your little experiment is concerned, I've changed my signature around several times and I have a crapload of posts. No significant changes for any terms I monitor.

=> 1) I do not participate at SitePoint so I can get signature links for ranking purposes. I participate because I enjoy the discussion and learning that occurs here. Before you were members here the SitePoint signatures were not visible to search engines yet I still accumulated 20,000+ posts so that is irrefutable.

=> 2) Since I have over 22,000 post I can tell you from direct experience those signature links don't do didly poo for my rankings.

=> 3) There's more to this world then SEO. I know you may find that hard to believe but it is true. Believe it or not people click on my signature links frequently. They do it because I (usually) offer helpful and insightful posts."

So basically you're going to get more direct traffic than you will ever get from the increase in SERPs you may hope to see from increasing backlinks.

Weird....

A few months back, a friend of mine was involved in a seo contest to see who could rank the best for a certain term.

I put that term linked to his page on my signature file in 5 forums.
Over 15k backlinks.

In less than a month of doing so, he jumped up to number 3 in the rankings and searching for that term brought up page after page of forum pages that were mine with his link in my signature file.

Doing so with a search term now for new sites of mine does help in bring my site up in google search!
Along with many forum pages.
In fact, in some terms, nothing but forum pages will show before my site is shown.

So, is it worth having signature links?
Damn straight!

Added: I just checked "social bookmark network" in google search.
It is a new site put up earlier this week. Put that term in my signature links on forums.
Guess what? I pop up as first result in the second page of search results!
So, you have to ask yourself, do you really believe signature links are not good for getting into google?

I always try to use them for direct traffic. However. I agree with Iowadawg, they do help with SERPs. I am not sure how much they carry in the form of PR juice but they are without a doubt in my mind, helpful in the SERPs.

Thanks for the tips. This will help me a lot for my new site.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

Weird....

So, is it worth having signature links?
Damn straight!

Added: I just checked "social bookmark network" in google search.
It is a new site put up earlier this week. Put that term in my signature links on forums.
Guess what? I pop up as first result in the second page of search results!
So, you have to ask yourself, do you really believe signature links are not good for getting into google?

Having a signature links if forums gives you lots of quality backlinks which Google counts.

Nice read. All I can say is that forum sigs and directory links may have low value but collectively they add up. One important thing to look at is that they increase the crawl rate of the Bots to your site which is very helpful in terms of boosting SERP.

Interesting stuff i have tried with and without and i have to say using forum posting in addition to other methods of link building definitely works to some degree in my opinion although the value may not be that high it still is worth doing as long as your posts are meaningful and not a load of one word efforts just to build up post count.

When you are setting up a brand new site, you will have no links to your domain. By changing all your forum signatures to point to your new domain, you are giving your new site a lot of new publicity and it will help a lot.

=> Only nofollow links don't help with SERPS all others are useful to varying degrees.

The above statement is false.
The search engines do count them as a backlink and they do count in your serps.

nofollow links basically tell google not to pass on any juice re: page rank.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

=> Only nofollow links don't help with SERPS all others are useful to varying degrees.

The above statement is false.
The search engines do count them as a backlink and they do count in your serps.

nofollow links basically tell google not to pass on any juice re: page rank.

When Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam

It does work for traffic and better pos in SERPs as i've seen from my personal xperience!

like am i the only one that read this and noticed about every 2-3 lines he makes a statement that will directly contradict a previous statement.

example:

=> How the searchengine spider know the link as a comment or forum signature? A link is just a link to the SE spiders.

Then it goes on to say how worthless forum links are basically about 3-4 times after that...

lol @ the many different ways he emphasizes that forum links are worthless. I disagree, especially depending on the competition of your keyword phrase. Forum links (spread over many different forums) over time DO help in the serps.