What is Google's stance on forum backlinks for SEO?

[snderitu]

Does Google really frown upon forum posting and commenting backlinks? What does Google consider comment spam? What proportion of backlinks from forums are within safe limit so as not to be considered unnatural in a link profile?

[not2easy]

Officially? Google thinks they are all pretty much worthless. See the discussion here when they announced it last May: [webmasterworld.com...] or get it from Google: [productforums.google.com...]

[goodroi]

Unofficially, Google may temporarily reward your rankings when you gain forum links. I would be careful when going after forum links.

Some forum links are great direct traffic sources for me so I am not worried about those links. Other forums are being spammed by automated programs and IMHO those are much more likely to cause a fatal penguin penalty.

Personally I don't worry about proportion or percentages of forum links. I worry more about developing links that generate traffic vs links that don't. The more traffic sources I generate the less dependent I am on Google traffic which is a good thing to work towards.

By the tone of the original question, I worry someone is hoping to use forum links as a shortcut. If you are lucky you can still use it as a shortcut but IMHO it is a much smarter business move to develop long term quality backlinks and avoid shortcuts.

[seoskunk]

I think there a bad idea in todays market and will not send quality signals to your site. Mostly they are used by churn and burn websites these days. Think of the hours saved posting "I agree with the comment above" in forums :)