Links in signature will help your serp rankings. But they do not help a lot for PR which is not very important anyway.

yes ..they consider them ..

Originally Posted by linkforu

yes ..they consider them ..

Or so you hope!


or was that irony?

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Again, There is no such thing as "dofollow"

And PR is of absolutely no use for anything.

Wow! Such negativity about PR (and do-follow may not actually exist, but NOT having the nofollow attribute attached to a link allows search engines to "follow" that link, and in my eyes that means something)

I have only been building and optimizing my own sites for a couple of years, but I have found from my previous sites the PR does directly affect your results in the SERP's.

A perfect example is a site I recently sold to a competitor to begin my new venture. He re-designed the site and lost the 3500 back links I had built up. The site was only a PR3 but ranked #1 for more than a dozen keyword terms (local) related to that business. Less than a month later, PR update came out, site became a PR0 and fell off the SERP's completely. The content was essentially the same and the only thing I saw that changed was the backlinks.

So, PR is worthless? I guess I disagree with that, but I don't obsess over it.

What matters most is rank of the page on which your link is placed, it may be that you have a link on PR0 page where home page PR is 5 or 6

A perfect example is a site I recently sold to a competitor to begin my new venture. He re-designed the site and lost the 3500 back links I had built up. The site was only a PR3 but ranked #1 for more than a dozen keyword terms (local) related to that business. Less than a month later, PR update came out, site became a PR0 and fell off the SERP's completely. The content was essentially the same and the only thing I saw that changed was the backlinks.

But of course it was the toolbar PR going that caused it???

You are mixing up cause and effect

With Google one of the biggest ranking boost is the anchor text of links, PR also comes from the same source, the links. Therefore: If the links go so does the ranking and so does the PR.

It is the loss of LINKS that cause both effects, ranking drop and PR drop. NOT the other way around.

Maybe I wrote it wrong, but I did see that the links going directly affected the (toolbar)PR and the SERP's. But the fall in the SERP's didn't happen until the PR update (which makes me question the notion that the "toolbar" PR is inaccurate). So the order would have been:
1. Links being taken away
2. PR Change to 0
3. Fall in SERP's

So my point was, PR does matter, how you get more or less PR is a different topic altogether, but the notion that PR doesn't matter is wrong IMHO because it DIRECTLY affects your SERP's along with other factors.

if the link spider could crawl, i think it is useful.

Yes it does but you going to need a lot of different sigs to make a difference.

Originally Posted by FenceGuy

Maybe I wrote it wrong, but I did see that the links going directly affected the (toolbar)PR and the SERP's. But the fall in the SERP's didn't happen until the PR update (which makes me question the notion that the "toolbar" PR is inaccurate). So the order would have been:
1. Links being taken away
2. PR Change to 0
3. Fall in SERP's

Updates and exports do not all happen simultaneously and not all datacentres are updated at the same time AND each of the queries could be looking at different datacenters.

Toolbar PR is updated/exported every few months, there is no particular time scale for this though it's approximately quarterly, and toolbar queries come from several DCs that appear to be on a DNS "round robin" for load balancing.

Datacentres are continuously synchronising and updating, the timing and order of visible effects are nothing to draw conclusions from.
It was probably a case of the toolbar export occuring before the index update, had it been the other way around, the results would have gone and the useless green bar could have persisted for upto 3 months.

Often signature links form forums are no-follow and does not have link juice and they do not help in terms of getting ranking or PR for a site but can help in terms of diverting traffic to a site.

ya it does but not the same force of link that included in the content in articles

Well, often signature links are nofollow and have no link juice and do not help in ranking for a site but to increase web presence of a site.

I think what you need to focus is your SERP the only value you will get from forum is the tips technics and some friends that may visit your or recommend.

Signature links definitely count towards your PR as long as they arent NOFOLLLOW.

sig links don't get you PR trust me I've tested this. It doesn't work. They do however help serps and will give you a balanced link profile. You can also get traffic from sig links, I normally get one or two a day from relevent forums.

On a scale of 1 to 100 with 100 being a nice juicy link from a pr 9 or 10 sig links are down in the low single digit column, this page once I have posted will have over 30 obl, basically no content of interest so I would value this just slightly higher than zero but less than 1.

So

(N/30)*0.85 ~ ≥0 || ≠1

^No idea what those figures mean. maths was never my strong point anyway in a few months time the only way a bot will be able to access this thread is thru the sitemap, doubt if there are any links to it, it has 30 or more outward bound links and 1 inward from a sitemap with thousands or millions of links on.
It aint gonna make first page of google for any search unless webmaster talk is included in the search terms.
So, 0.002?

thanks
for ur dicussions