Forum Signatures in regards to Backlinks

[instantk]

Say I go to a forum with a PR6. I go to one of the sections and post with my signature in an individual thread. The thread has no PR or has a PR0, what kind of back link credit to I get?

Is it worth it to do this?


I also notice at DP that people sell posts with links on their PR weighted blogs. After the post disappears from the first page and goes to archive, do you still get any real PR credit for that back link?

Again, is it worth it?

Thanks. I am trying to grow traffic to my sites and do not want to spin my wheels.

 

[oldenstylehats]

Signature links only provide minimal juice, though they can be a good way to get your sites indexed more quickly. In terms of people selling links in posts, it works, but not as well as it used to. PR is not the metric to look at any more.

 

[cparainmaker]

A signature is going to do you more justice as some one clicking on it then it will repping your sites in the search engines, try some social bookmarking sites instead.

 

[oldenstylehats]

A signature is going to do you more justice as some one clicking on it then it will repping your sites in the search engines, try some social bookmarking sites instead.

Major co-sign here.

 

[Ramage]

Just a small question. How are the search engine spiders able to differentiate between a signature link and a normal link? They won't go "Oh, here's a forum signature" and give it less juice. Just curious.

 

[cparainmaker]

Just a small question. How are the search engine spiders able to differentiate between a signature link and a normal link? They won't go "Oh, here's a forum signature" and give it less juice. Just curious.

Why don't you call google up and ask them, I am sure they would love to explain their algorithms to you

 

[oldenstylehats]

Just a small question. How are the search engine spiders able to differentiate between a signature link and a normal link? They won't go "Oh, here's a forum signature" and give it less juice. Just curious.

Actually, they'd probably just devalue it the same way they do when there are multiple instances of the exact same content across a large number of pages on a site. If they were concerned, to create a probabilistic method to discern signature from content wouldn't be complicated, but I doubt they care.

 

[ContentFarmer]

Not that I have access to their algo, but thinking about it for a bit I'd think that the content of the thread is likely indirectly related to your site, so your incoming link is treated as coming from an irrelevant site. Pattern analysis algorithms are quite advanced and could also very likely determine whether a page has a structure similar to a forum.

Take my site, for example. You'll notice that it doesn't detect any of the 1000's of incoming signature links from forum posts: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link:teratask.com . However, http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=teratask.com shows that it does index them. Somehow either their link: results are inaccurate or they are determining that the forums are forums.