USENET links.

Does this hurt?

[noddie]

Howdy all, I might be "giving away gold" here or asking an obvious question, anyway I choose to toss out the flag...

When posting to e.g. Google Groups and you have a signature or some other way of exposing a link to your site all the USENET "scrappers" will build this as an a href to your site.
Does these links hurt?
Do they count for PR?
If the latter, why haven't I gotten more pagerank when in the webmaster tools it's still showing as "no pagerank" but still I've got 450 links where 90% of them comes from USENET scrappers...?

[reprint]

I am no expert but from my experience, they don't hurt but they don't help PR. What they do is hopefully bring people to your site. Assuming you are posting in a forum that is related to the website you link to, you should have some visitors and maybe even people who stick around or that you can market to. Its PR in the other sense not the page rank sense by getting your weblink in front of people who might be motivated to visit.

[willybfriendly]

Usenet traffic can be very good traffic, at least in my experience.

Interesting you should refer to "usenet scrapers" since that is exactly what G-Groups is. Usenet remains the wild west of the web.

WBF

[noddie]

Great thanx :)
I'm really beginning to get a hang of this! :)

Our site sold its FIRST product YESTERDAY (E-Commerce site, download product) and that's 45 days a head of the schedule! :)
In addition we're all time high yesterday in unique IP page hits, and we're beating that one today and quadrupling the amount of registered users now adays compared to just a couple of WEEKS ago! :)
In addition to a handful of VERY good articles in related magazines...
Two of them the last two weeks! :)

Life is good now adays...

[gndv]

As a Usenet purest I cringe at your question.

My personal opinion on this is that search engines likely discount links from user generated content networks like Usenet. Since Usenet is easy to spam (on small levels) I doubt they'd have much incentive to count links from Usenet posts very heavily.

The other thing to consider is that Usenet scraper sites often have the same content, so some sites might will likely have duplicate content issues which might effect link juice.

If you want to use Usenet as a marketing tool I'd suggest finding groups which cover your topic and start participating in there. Some groups are screaming for an expert and if you could fill that role it might be an opportunity to leverage influence to gain natural links and drive traffic.

My 2 cents.