Email Signatures hurting organic rankings?

[sopho]

I recently met a SEO guru who claimed that putting url's in email signatures is no longer a good practice. His premise is that google and other se's might consider this spam, and will use it against you.

Now I thought this was a silly comment on his part, since emails I send to friends, family, and business contacts have nothing to do with search engines. We do not use gmail, hotmail, or the like in our business correspondence, so how in the world could this be possible?

I called him back on this, and he said 'google desktop'... I sat back in my chair and said if that is the case, I smell a pretty big lawsuit.

Your thoughts?

[bird]

If people actually store your e-mail for Google Desktop to find your URL, then that should be a rather good non-spam indicator. Spam e-mails tend to get deleted on sight, so their URLs will not appear in desktop searches as often.

I'd say the conclusion of your "guru" sounds rather far fetched.