Posting links in forums

[askjoe]

Hey, what do you guys think about posting links in forums - I know google can see them - how do they rank - is it good or bad?

Comments please

Askjoe

[korkus2000]

Please don't post them here. :)

I don't like it. I think it kills forums if people do it to raise their page rank. They also get out of an index quickly as time goes on.

[BigDave]

I'm all in favor of posting links in forums. It helps people find additional information on the subject being discussed. For example I just posted 2 links on this board to googles webmaster guidelines.

But if you are refering to posting your own links just to get better ranking, then I hope the moderators ban you! If you have good, related content, others will post links to your site on the forum, and you will get traffic from them. I probably get over 1000 visitors a month from people following links poated on various forums, and I've never posted any of those links myself.

[askjoe]

I won't post any links here - I was talking about posting them on sites related to mine. I was just curious on how much they were weighed by the google spider - thats all.

[aka ferrari360]

its the same as any other page - it depends on the pagerank of the forum thread the URL appears on and how many other URLs are on that page.

[BigDave]

It depends on the forum software whether google is able to crawl it. It is usually not worth very much. If it a forum that you are truly active on, and they allow you to have a .sig that includes your URL, then they can add up over time.

[hakre]

yo askjoe,

i would ever post it, if it's appropriate to the thread. i don't know how much a redirector script for links, like used in this forum, will irritate google. this can be an interesting discussion further.

[mayor]

Posting your url's on forums is a great way to get yourself spammed.

[WindSun]

I am in favor of posting links, if they are links to information directly related to what the topic is about. It gets to be a real hassle to find work arounds to try and tell people to go some website if you can't put a link.

That is one reason I tend to spend more time in another webmaster forum than this one. If someone talks about a nifty tool and posts a link, I can just click the link. I don't have to guess at it or do a Google search to find it.

On the other hand, links in sigs or advertising your own site I think should definately be out.

[heini]

The main problem is most forums are either not spidered at all, like BigDave said, or the PR of the pages is very low.

Perhaps boards allowing for sig files and direkt links should be treated the same as guestbooks and all links going out of those get just discounted.

[Brett_Tabke]

Our collective thoughts on it:

Professional Forum Spammers [webmasterworld.com]