Link building using forum signatures doesn’t work however. This might come as a shock to some as there is a whole separate industry of forum link builders out there these days. Lots of businesses online that are offering forum link building services only showing the prospective clients how many backlinks they can get from such service.
While getting the backlinks using such technique is not hard to do, how much true value these backlinks provide in terms of passing link juice is the question. Let’s go over some facts which will help us understand the situation a little better.
Forums that allow you to post your signature links usually allow you to post 4 signature links on average with some forums restricting the members by allowing only two signature links where some forums not restricting the members at all meaning you can have all the links you want on your signature. Some are actually taking advantage of such forums by using as many as 6 – 8 links on their signatures.
Now, if we look at how many comments one single tread many have and how many signature links each individual forum thread many have, we see that a single thread having 20 comments per page with each member having 4 links in there signature, that’s 80 external links on each page! Not to mention all the Adsense and other external links the forum owners add in an attempt to monetize their forums. It is therefore not unusual for a single page to have somewhere between 100 to 140+ external links on a single page and that a LOT of external links.
Since the value of the link juice is weighted based on the number of external links are found on that page with more value per link from a page with least amount of external links, you hardly get any value for your links from such page.
Another important fact that needs to be considered here which is that a new thread usually only stays on the category front page for couple of hours on a busy forum after when it moved to the inner pages allowing Googlebot only a 2 hour window to find that thread, index it, and crawl each and every links found on that page which is something that doesn’t happen all the time. Since a new thread page will not have any PR of its own, will not have much authority individually, and will not stay on the forum front page for long, having a backlink from such page will hardly pass any link juice if any at all.
I’m not trying to burst the bubbles of people that provide forum link building services. I’m just pointing out some facts to consider, so that all your hard work doesn’t go in vein.