Forum sigs and inbound links

[groundctrl]

Just a quick question I've always wondered: When you have a forum sig that passes to one of your sites, does that provide any link equity to the site, or not? Is there any value to it?

[hugegrowth]

I think it can increase pagerank, from my experience.

[Keyboard Cowboy]

All forum (vB) links have "no follow" values.

He's talking about sig links that you input yourself, and those are "nofollow" free. Example; Yours look like

<a href="http://www.netcheap.com" target="_blank">NETCHEAP</a>

And yes, it adds a little value. How much, however, is probably debatable. If you were to place links in your sig for PR reasons here on dnf for instance, I'd go with something relevant to domaining

[Jacksplat]

I havent found any value in putting my sites in sigs. I have realized unfortunately that having your sites in your sig means you gotta be carefull with who you piss off, and keeping unique ideas unique. Sales threads and Unique sites in your sig is just asking for competition among other things.

Quality directories however do help. It's well worth the odd 50$ or so for lifetime inclusion, even annual. The right blogs as well are great but do require little work and research.

Good Luck.
Jack

[pelican]

the thing i dont like about lifetime inclusion is, you dont know how long the directory/site will exists.

[Keyboard Cowboy]

I have realized unfortunately that having your sites in your sig means you gotta be carefull with who you piss off, and keeping unique ideas unique. Sales threads and Unique sites in your sig is just asking for competition among other things.

Ain't that the truth...

[Liquiteq]

All forum (vB) links have "no follow" values.

Each SE responds slightly differently to the nofollow attribute. Tested logs indicate that Google will not follow the link, unless the page that is linked to is indexed and cached. Yahoo appears to crawl them regardless.

In terms of "pagerank", or "voting power", it is very difficult to identify whether these links are being discounted or devalued without controlled experimentation on a site with no existing PR or links. But one thing is for certain, "nofollow" links categorically provides SEO benefit in terms of regular indexing.

Just a quick question I've always wondered: When you have a forum sig that passes to one of your sites, does that provide any link equity to the site, or not? Is there any value to it?

Yes, but nested links, surrounded by natural content, are likely to yield a higher transfer of power/relevance. Sig Links are still a very viable source of pagerank, but just as Keyboard_(Legend)_Cowboy says, it's important that the page/site is relevant to your keywords.

Consider your link strategy carefully. If you are targeting for Google obtain fewer, more highly relevent, high authority links:

where x = pagerank value
where ~ = approximation

**(This operates on a logarithmic scale and is simplified for the purpose of this discussion)**

PR x = ~4 * PR x+1
PR x = ~18 * PR x
PR x = ~101 * PR x-1

Thus, it would take an incredible number of PR3 links to acheive PR7, but only ~4 * PR8.

This simply illustrates the number of links required to acheive any given pagerank (assuming less than 50 outbound links), and that forum posting alone will not result in a site of authority.

one last related point.. DNF Exclusive forum cannot be indexed and therefor will not provide any sig benefits except direct traffic.