Posts Tagged ‘Signature’

The building of backlinks to website, that is links from one site to another, is a very important way for the site being linked to. They need these links to get better rankings in the search results of the search engines like Google. These backlinks can be build in many ways. One of the methods that is commonly suggested, usually by the less experiences search engine optimizers is to post messages in forums and have a link to your website in the signature at the bottom of the message posted. When the search engines index that discussion thread, then they will index that link to your website and theoretically consider it a backlink. For some reason, in general the more experienced search engine optimizers do not recommend this way to build backlinks.

Just how good is a backlink from a forum signature link? A link is only useful to a website if it actually passes what is called link juice. This is the value that is passes. Google’s PageRank score is one way of looking at the value of the link juice that is given to a page. The higher a pages PageRank, the more link juice that is passed. Google PageRank (PR) goes from 0, being the lowest to 10, being the highest. That link juice also has to be shared by all the other links on the page.

So let’s look at a typical forum discussion thread. On almost every forum, almost all the pages that the discussions are on never get above a PR of 0, which is the lowest. The home page of the forum may be 4 or 5 or higher, but it’s the PR of the page that the link is on, not the PR of the home page that counts. If you also look at a typical forum discussion page and count just how many links there are on a page. If you count them, you fill find that most have 100 or more links on the page. These links will be the forum navigation links, the thread tools and function links, the header and footer links, the profile links, links in posts, post tool and functions links and, of course, the signature links. That is an awful lot of links that have to share that PR of 0 that the page has. If you do the maths, the value of links juice that passes through each of those 100 links is next to zero. This probably makes the effort to get backlinks by posting in forums not worth the effort as the link juice is negligible. There are many other ways to build effective backlinks.