Are forum links becoming more and more useless

[maza_hunter]

I have to come to doubt the usefulness of forum links. Proof maybe?

During the last pr update the site which i own went from pr1 to pr4 on the homepage, but from pr2 to pr6 on the register page, the reason for this is the site has a referral system where referral links direct straight to the register page. 20% of the links to my website go to the homepage and they come from blogs and other websites which review my site etc, although some are from forums. Whereas the other 80% of the links to the website direct to the register page and come from referral links which 99% of the time are in forum posts and 1% of the time come from blogs and review sites etc..

Now Google has updated pagerank again today, the pr on both my homepage and register page are pr3. A drop of 1 on the homepage and 3 on the register page! Hmmm. Could this show that Google has decided to count forum links for less? More evidence will be needed, but in my case this certainly seems to be what happend.

Also all the links are natural.

 

[itsjinx]

My personal opinion is that forum links are pretty much useless for any good competing site. Google clearly knows that in 2 seconds, a forum poster with thousands of posts can add a link that will appear on thousands of pages, and therefore I believe google doesn't value them for anything other than another link to crawl.

 

[Ranko Jones]

My ranks dropped sharply for my two mainly keywords after I started indexing profile links (11 to 25-30 and 50s to 100s- doesnlt seem just usual from my prev. experience dance as it has been over a week now).

This was about two weeks ago altho checking sescout today it seems one of them is making a small climb- went from 50's to 110s-120s originally but now has been jumping around the 90s. It has given me a little optimism but I won't hold my breath.

 

[LBrown]

1) Who cares about PR? There could be a lot of reasons you lost your PR, but it won't effect your ranking or your income.

2) The SEO effects of profile links vary. For some keywords, all you will need is some profile links. For other keywords, profile links ARE useless. Look at what others who are ranking in your niche are using for links. Those are the types of links Google wants you to use. If no one is ranking with the help of forum links then don't build profile links.

 

[KingMasterEg]

may be true , the page rank updating last week , make one of my website from 0 to 3 , only backlinks from forum profiles only, then when i read your topic about today update, i checked and found it dropped to 1

i said it before , forum profiles after i purchased xrumer , become not strong after google panda update . bad luck to me

 

[xgnux]

Forum Links work if they are not spammy. Profile links are less effective ofc.

 

[lqmatrix]

xrumer blasts used to work wonders, ever since panda it has done nothing for me.

 

[omida86]

One if my clients site lost ranking for one keyword after I tried some profile linking, gives me the impression that profile links are worthless.