Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Will posting my links in forums work at all? I visit a lot of forums so would this help at all?
Thanks for all the help guys!
Much better to avoid obsessing about a little green bar that matters little, and put your energy into building a better site.
If you want links, then submit your site to appropriate quality directories (read the guidelines first). They WANT your URL, forum managers don't.
On the web, it's search results, unique visitors, conversions and ROI that matter.
Not little green men from Mars, or men with little green bars.
Good Luck :)
[edited by: Quadrille at 8:50 am (utc) on July 21, 2006]
Will posting my links in forums work at all? I visit a lot of forums so would this help at all?
Yes, provided you keep your links to your signatures, and actually post something useful. Otherwise, you will just annoy people.
It'll help to get you banned from a lot of forums, if that's what you had in mind.
That depends on your forum. A lot of forum owners take a dim view of link-dropping, where someone (or some bot) signs up, leaves their link, and posts nothing at all of use. So the admin responds by disallowing signatures and discouraging all linking out.
Other forums welcome sig links, because they encourage people to post. They recognise it as part of the give and take of the web. But very few admins allow this without some sort of condition. They may not allow adult links, for instance, or you have to have a certain post count without too many "me too" posts.
Links from forums can be a useful part of your strategy, and you're missing out on a lot if you follow Quadrille's advice and ignore them altogether. But use them wisely and in moderation, following the rules of each community, if you don't want to end up with a reputation as a spammer.
If you want to meet and discuss; great.
If your primary motivation is link dropping, it's a sad forum that will make you welcome.
Plus a link from a forum (even one that does not utilise nofollow) really has very little value.
There was a time when it was 'clever' to drop links in forums; now, it's a shortcut to being labelled as a spammer, with very-small-to-zero reward. Don't be tempted.
what is the fastest and easiest way to improve the PR of my site?
Get in DMOZ.
Build loads of useful content pages and have a link back to your home page on every page in your site. BUT don't use "Home Page" as the link text us "A term" that you are targetting. That won't help your PR but it will help your allinanchor.
Sid
[edited by: Hissingsid at 2:02 pm (utc) on July 21, 2006]
Plus a link from a forum (even one that does not utilise nofollow) really has very little value.
That depends on the forum, and how related it is to your website. People do sell their signature links, so they must have value to some people. The going rate is around 30 to 40 cents per post per month.
I was referring to SEO value - note the thread title ;)
Also, how would I go about getting inbound links from high PR pages, or like where would they put them exactly..?
Thanks for the help guys!
Also, if you guys want to post a link to my site to look at it just tell me in case that helps
If, as is likely, the forum links are of low quality they might not be worthless -- but they might be nearly so.
In-Bound Link (IBL) Quality . This is a measurement of key elements on the page containing an in-bound link which, in combination, influence the link reputation for the target of the link.
Very nice post. I'll have to read more into what defines their "key elements"...
I was noticing that a lot of these threads in forums aren't being cached by google. Apparently they can't follow the "?" in the php... admin is suppose to fix something.
So find the forum you want to be in, go to a couple-of-months old thread, and see if it's cached.
If not, problem solved.... won't do you any good.
Need I say more?
We had to completely overhaul our link building programs to be Big Daddy compliant. We seem to have a handle on it. As best as one can at least. Forums links CAN be done, but the actual time (ie; money) to achieve the results can be prohibitive. Another great filter.
We have been actively monitoring and adapting Link Building programs since hurricane ‘Florida’ and ‘Hill Top’. Big Daddy was another major storm on the ‘vote’ weighting.
We had to completely overhaul our link building programs to be Big Daddy compliant. We seem to have a handle on it. As best as one can at least. Forums links CAN be done, but the actual time (ie; money) to achieve the results can be prohibitive. Another great filter.
A lot of forum content tends to go unindexed, and I imagine BigDaddy made this more so for a lot of smaller forums. I suppose that does more than anything to discourage people from posting purely to gain backlinks. It's just not worth it, unless it's a forum which you're actively interested in as well. Except, of course, to all the posting bots, which will carry on as before.
A real working site will have people that tell 2 people and so on.
