What does forum sigs mean?

[Chatmaster]

Over the years I have heard many forum members at SEO forums say just how little a signature link means for seo. But has anybody ever thought what it can mean to the forum owner? Here is a great example!

I am a member at MyADSL. In my signature is a link to this forum with the link text 'SEO Forum'

http://www.google.co.za/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&q=%22seo+forum%22&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryZA
mybroadband.co.za is ranking #2 based only on my signature... :grin:

[Koz]

Very interesting!

I think forum sigs are good in terms of getting traffic to a forum. And isn't getting exposure / traffic a byproduct of SEO?

[Blazingpie]

Very interesting!

I think forum sigs are good in terms of getting traffic to a forum. And isn't getting exposure / traffic a byproduct of SEO?

no, it's the aim of SEO :p

[Paz]

I had a hotels site that ranked really well (against 30 other million searches) on forum signatures and a couple of hundred free directory listings - nothing much else externally.

I'm convinced a few thousand forum links can hurt a site in Google though, especially if it's an off-topic forum. I see many senior members in SEO forums remove links from their sigs, others link to their forum profile, which then means only a single link to their site.

Another place where forums can help are for semi competitive searches are thread titles. I've seen this in Yahoo, but especially in MSN.

Chatmaster, next time we publish an article, why don't you create a thread with title and write a intro with a link, and put the article as a your forum sig link? Let's see what happens!


Cheers,
Paz.

[chokan]

A nice thought, I agree with Paz, the disrelated link will be a negative factor in your site seo campaign.