The Death of Signature Links

[Brian Turner]

Last summer I discovered the power of signature links. And darn, they had power.

Forum pages were effectively treated like any other webpage - so long as they could be crawled, then the links were simply links.

You can imagine that, when a person has a few thousand posts on a well marketed and high PR forum, what the result could be. Significant PR from the posts alone, and anchor text benefit to boot.

I kept all this darn close to myself and sought out well indexed high PR forums specifically for the sig link benefits. I even found myself hanging on and enjoying a few while I was there - and getting additional post benefits while I continued posting. What a ripper!

I used to run YaBB SE forum software - but it was a bugger to get indexed - and vBulletin promised a lot in terms of SEO so I upgraded to vB and have never been happier with it.

That's despite the fact that Google began to devalue forum links last September. Ironically, that was about the first time that I actually saw anyone else mention what I'd discovered - and that was John Scott at IMR. He also seems to have joined various forums for the purposes of getting his sig link about.

Then Florida hit. And forums died.

What happened is that Google outright flattened PR voting from forum pages. And it still applies to this day.

What am I talking about?

Forum signature links effectively carry no PR.

I saw this in action recently - update of April 20th saw one of my hobby sites remain at PR6, while another of my hobby sites dropped to PR5. One of them had minimal links, while the other had various links, plus approximately 5,000 forum signature links from perhaps 80 different forums.

Yep - you guess it - the PR5 site had the sig links to it. To myself it was absolute proof that forum signature links are effectively worthless for PR.

The question that remains is as to whether *any* PR is voted from forum pages.

Of course, PR itself has greatly lost value in terms of ranking - but in terms of carrying a badge of higher PR, signature links are now dead for that.

Of course, signature links still have uses for human users - albeit limited ones (low clickthru rate) - and have limited anchor text usage (I've seen it suggested that Google now ignores most sig links).

However, signature links can still play a part in general personal branding.

When you join a forum you have an opportunity to join a community on a personal and professional level. You can give your professional and educated opinion about matters others know less about - business issues you specialise in, for example - plus you can sell yourself as a person and individual by the way you interract with other people.

That way, if someone is truly looking for business in your area of expertise, it is not at all impossible for you to be approached about this. I know one of my first commercial SEO clients came about this way (and we are still working together now).

Point is, those people who nowadays think they should post around forums to get their signature link about are missing the point. The plot for that story finished last year. This year's story is one of personal business marketing. Otherwise you could well be simply wasting your time. After all, you get what you pay for, and forum signature links are very, very, cheap.

[GoldDust]

Excellent read...


You couldnt have said it any better

[Brian Turner]

Signature links are still worth having, IMO, and they do have some value for human traffic and SEO - but those people who join forums, and post "LOL" 100 times for the supposed sig link benefits are deluding themselves just a little if they think there will be a significant return.

[altyfc]

Lol.

[altyfc]

Sorry, I'll be serious for a moment... that was a good summary, Brian. I have always seen signature files for their 'human benefit' only, and little beyond. If there has been any PR benefit, then that's just been a bonus but not the prime aim.

You are right to highlight the "LOL" and "and me" type of posts. I'm surprised John S. tolerates those on IMR but I guess there's the old argument of freedom of speech to consider as well. A sig file will only hold value, though, if the post that accompanies it is a little more than that, IMO.

I think another thing that is worth noting with signature files is the nature of the site that is advertised. We have hundreds of different sites, but very deliberately tend to focus upon our forums in our sig files, simply because we believe that the best place to advertise them is to people that are already familiar with the notion of forums in the first place. It's easy to forget that the majority of internet users probably aren't familiar with forums.

Aaron

[Brian Turner]

That's a very good point about forums - just because webmasters might be a little web-savvy and internet experienced, doesn't mean to say their target users are.

[scisoft]

Hi Brian.

I have noticed your considerable forum activity. In fact I am wondering - are you really positive that the forum signs are dead for SEO? I believe they are not. At least, there are some rankings I would find difficult to explain otherwise. They may have been decapriated, that is true.

[JamesSmith]

There not dead, I quote often google for "uh-hosting", forums always come up.

[Brian Turner]

Certainly forum sig links have some value in terms of SEO - but it really is remarkably little.

I'm pretty sure that if I put up 1,000 links for a keyword across multiple static sites, and put a competing keyword in 1,000 sig links of a forum, the sig link term will always rank lower.

Forum content may come up in searches - and keywords in sig links certainly have some limited usefulness. However, it has to be said, there are far better ways of actually link building for targeted keywords.

I've also seen an interesting claim that Google will only count the first dozen or so links from anyone site to an external page - so if that theory were to hold true, then many sig links would be worth the same as just a few. I've not got around to testing that idea, though.

[Will.Spencer]

Brian:

That was a very nicely written article. I especially appreciated that it pointed out the timing of the change in the way that forum signature links are handled.

A few days ago, the Search Engine Reverse Engineering project initiated a public online test to validate search engine behavior regarding forum signature links.

The test description is online at Do forum signature links help PageRank and SERPS?.

I believe it is prudent to give the search engines as long as two months before pronouncing results of any of the Search Engine Reverse Engineering projects' tests.

I have my own feelings on how the results will turn out -- but feelings are not what the Search Engine Reverse Engineering Project is all about.