i must admit i have a signature on whatever i do, emails, forums, guestbooks, free reports, absolutely everything, but with regards to do sig links work in forums, i think they do. i get a lot of traffic through my sig links on a week-by-week basis. my stats show that, and whislt they continue to show i am getting visitors through my sigs, i will continue to use sigs.

As long as you have a decent traffic analysis program like webalizer etc, it shows you where your visitors are coming from. just keep an eye on your stats.

Originally Posted by colochris

Ok so here is my question, if you post in a forum and your signature points to your own forum, does this help with being indexed or anything?

Like does it count as a backlink?

The reason why I am asking is because I run a forum, and I was thinking about buying the signatures of some of my members.

Their signatures would point to my site, and maybe this would help?

But I am not the pro here.

Maybe someone could give me some tips.

Chris

Well for one, you can do one thing .... take some of the members sites listed down in their signature and check the backlinks to that respective site on Google. If you see that this forum is backlinking to the site from multiple pages then I guess you can be sure that it does help.

many sig links will show as backlinks when you check, but that doesn't mean those links are given much weight in the algorithm.

I'm sure they count for something, but I highly doubt they count for much. I'd far prefer having one or two high quality links than hundreds of sig links.

But the links will deliver traffic to your site directly if you take part in the discussion. Using anchor text that entice someone to click on the link will most likely help too. I can't think of any reason not to use links in your forum signature, but I wouldn't expect any major seo benefits to come from them.

Hehe, thanks for telling me. Never knew they did count as backlinks.

Simply: better to use signatures than not to use.

signatures are great resources for backlink . if you get many topics on big forums , your site will be indexed so quickly and you will have good backlink quan*****

Its a good seo technique for attaining back-links but purely depending on signatures may harm the site.

Originally Posted by GremlinaCoconut

It doesn't do any harm...

I have to disagree here. As with anything else, there's an opportunity cost associated with forum signatures. While you're joining forums, creating accounts, and writing posts to drop a link under, you could have been doing something else, whether it's directory submission, or content creation. So if you go into this expecting sig links to double your page rank, this will distract you from more productive ways to go about that.

Now if your goal is to join an interesting community - like this one, full of knowledgable and helpful people - and take part in the discussions, instead of simply collecting links, then it won't hurt. And, like others said, you can get people to your site this way, if you have enough to contribute and make people curious about you to click.

Google says they don't like pages with "too many" links, more than 100. So if you add up all the navigation, the links in other peoples' sigs, and everything else on a page you want to add yours to, it's probably a lost cause.

In conclusion, links in your signature can have benefits, but they also take your time to put together, so you should think about what your priorities are and weigh this all together.

I disagree about the 100 links part. I think all Google ever really said was if you have a sitemap with more than 100 links you may want to turn it into 2 pages instead of one.

I do though agree with everything else you said. Sure a sig link is a backlink, but if your goal in posting is to get another sig link out there you're wasting your time since there are better ways to spend your time and it would indeed be an opportunity cost.

On the other hand if your goal in posting to forums is to be part of the community then a sig link isn't going to hurt. There isn't any reason I can think not to add some links (within reason) to your forum sig. Just don't expect them to have any significant impact on your rankings.

Forum signatures do appear on google, act as back links and help increase search engine exposures.

Remember though that just because a sig link shows up when checking backlinks in Google or any other search engine, it doesn't mean that link carries much weight when it comes to where your pages rank.

Not all links are created equal. Some are going to be more valuable and more influential than others. If you were to look at the value of the links pointing into your site, sig links will probably be at the low end. Yes they are backlinks, but they probably aren't particularly influential when it comes to where your pages rank.