Just think about forum profile links:-
When you create an account on the forum, you want to participate in the discussion. And share your views, learn from others etc.
Forum sites have an option in the profile where you can add your social accounts, website url. Why?
Because you can establish contacts with other forum members. You let them connect with you, follow you, and visit your blog to know more about you.This way everything will look natural to the forum admin and Google. And Google wants bloggers to be more social, There is no harm promoting your site and contents on social sites, community pages. Till you are not spamming those sites. If you add value to any site, Google will love your link.
Now think, Any normal person who joins a forum naturally to participate in the discussions, he will add his home page to the profile, Not the inner page,
That;s what makes the difference between a spammer and a natural account holder. Google is very smart to figure out your intentions.
Focus on promoting your domain name. Linking to the domain name (Home page) will increase the trust for over all site.
You don't need links to every inner page to rank. Nowadays, Google considers, How trust worthy the domain is before ranking its pages.
That's why top sites get ranked for every post they make. Because they already have gained the trust.
Apology for any grammatical mistake.
Yes, but the situation changes when you suddenly have 1k+ profile links from forums - no average person would do that. Remember what Google is saying? You need to get links
naturally. That means other webmasters/people will visit your website, find it so amazing and start sharing it everywhere. You can fool Google into thinking some X webmaster from XYZ.com linked to your site because he finds it awesome when in reality XYZ.com is owned by you and it's just part of a PBN. Same thing with guest posts and editorial links - you pay writers/bloggers/editors/webmasters money and they link out to you in a post that Google finds natural. In both cases, if you build 1k+ links, you won't get penalized, in fact you will rank for most keywords in your niche. But, build 1k+ profile links and your website won't budge - they won't do shit. So, the question is, why isn't it natural for Google to start getting so many links from forum profiles?
It's because those links have no value at all, and "value" in Google's eyes is text & images. Forum links are nothing more than just a link and an anchor text - no other text surrounding the link, therefore not giving any context to why the hell the link exists there in the first place. Relevance makes the difference between a good link and a great link. Forum links have NO relevance at all.
Also, in a forum, you add value to the community by posting a thread and embedding the link there, participating in a discussion, that IS what Google wants to see. That adds relevance to the link. Sure, profile links let you be social and all that shit. None of that matters to Google's algorithm - if you are relevant you will rank, if you are not, you WON'T. You can be the most social guy in the world and while there might not be any harm in promoting your site like you say, it won't do you any good either for SEO.
DA has absolutely nothing to do with how well a page performs in Google.
I agree DA is just a third party metrics.
But, Google uses Domain trust value to rank its pages.
A domain which has high trust value will get higher rankings for its pages than a domain which is new and have lesser trust.
So for profile link building, it's better to put homepage links.
Google uses 200+ ranking factors to rank a page, not just domain trust. What you said is terribly false LOL and has such a high impact on the SERP-s that it WILL never get implemented by Google. If what you say is true, then new sites would never rank - imagine a search engine with that scenario...
Google cannot distinguish between profile link, directory, citation etc etc. They just look at the source of the backlink (domain, internal linking, external linking, content etc) so there will be no difference if profile has a link to homepage or inner page.
The problem with profile links is that they are not interlinked and therefore has really little value.
So at the end of the day it is not about type of a backlink. It is about the source of the backlink. Forum link can also be a good one if the domain is good.
I wrote an algorithm to distinguish between profile links, directory links, citations, web 2.0 blogs, authority sites, editorial sites, etc... GSA, as a software, in its core, works by recognizing the platforms it posts links to. So, you are assuming Google, a billion dollar company, cannot do that? Made my day really! And it's not just the source of a backlink, relevance plays a pretty big role too - it's relevance first, power second. Otherwise, you can rank a blank page for anything you want in the title. If you are Wikipedia, maybe you can do that. A smaller guy? Don't think so...
Forum links are worthless in the sense that you waste time building them, because they won't help. And I use forums mostly for traffic, not SEO, it just happens that it helps in SEO as well because the link is relevant and the thread might rank for related keywords if it's a big forum. So, it's a win-win for every side if you do it this way, including Google.