linking in other forums

basically having a URL in a signature line or profile

[sierra11b]

I frequent three other forums. All of which provide me business as I personally know most of its members in my market area.

Is it bad to put my URL in my signature or personal profile? I did this for awhile and all the SERPS picked up on it. if I check my links in any major search engine I’d get about 200 results for that link for those particular forums.

Seemed like my URL carried over for every post and then some.

Is this a bad thing?

Also, is it bad that these forums have nothing to do with my field?

[OCSupertones]

It won't hurt you. Keep the sig links.

[plasma800]

I do it on every forum I can possibly can!

[Dominic_X]

Depends on how many links and from how wide a variety of sites you have other than the links in your sig files.

Say your site is newish. You ad a link in the sig file and all of a sudden have 200 plus links from the one domain. Google is gonna say 'you're kidding right - go to the sandbox, do not collect $200'

If your site has links from 2,000 different sites, to a variety of your pages not just the homepage... then you ad a link to a sig file and all of a sudden have 200 more links from the one domain, google won't have such a big problem with it and you will get a little benefit.

Take into account: Some forums disallow spiders from the sig files. Forum pages are of extremely low pagerank value, despite the pr of the forum home.

Treat forum sigs as advertising and nofollow them until your site has a very well established pool of links first.

[or]

Create the equivilent of a presell page in the forum. Usually these types of forums will have a 'review my site' section. SEO a post seeking reviews of your site, then direct the links in your sig file to that presell page.

End result is you have 200 pages of the forum linking to the one presell page within the forum that will appear in your search results... with links to your site... much more effective.

[OCSupertones]

dominic,

most of your post is hypothesis, not fact.

The G sandbox is a hypothesis. Some people(myself included) think that you go to the sandbox no matter what, and at least you will have the links for Y and MSN.

Brandon

[Dominic_X]

Ok, so it's not from a press release by google.

But do you see the common sense behind it?

[aris1970]

Some people(myself included) think that you go to the sandbox no matter what

FYI This is not true for sure, as there are several new sites that perform great from the start. I have already stated on another post for a new website we built that gained several authoritative non-reciprocal backlinks, is on the top10 of G among 1 million results.

[sierra11b]

Hahaha great.... So what's the verdict then? ;)

[Dominic_X]

I think they jury will always be out on a lot of seo stuff, as mentioned take what you can from the opinions offered.

[sierra11b]

I see. lol

So maybe just a cut and dry "would you do it?" for anyone that's willing to respond.

That may be more appropriate in this case.

[martinibuster]

I wouldn't do it. There are better sources of one way inbounds- some of them free, some of them you have to scratch a back for, some you have to pay for and some are low lying fruit no one thought to look for.