How Much does participating at a Forum increase the strength of a back link?

[Mike Anthony]

Some one mentioned this in another thread. It was an interesting point. Essentially they stated that participation on a forum makes the links in your profile stronger and increases the indexing of the link? How many sites is that worth doing on? Whats your take?

[madison_avenue]

The main advantage of participation is that every time you post you are advertising your link and you will get traffic from people clicking. I believe-I may be wrong- that if you have 10 posts you have attained most of the link value you will attain. More than this will give very little extra link juice.

[deloriagod]

I'm pretty sure it works the same as any other site pointing a ton of links back to your site. Lots of links from 1 site = less value per link.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by madison_avenue

The main advantage of participation is that every time you post you are advertising your link and you will get traffic from people clicking. I believe-I may be wrong- that if you have 10 posts you have attained most of the link value you will attain. More than this will give very little extra link juice.

Just curious where do you derive that post count thing from?

[shulink]

I think it helps, but not by much because there are so many links on any forum. I found high rank blogs contribute more to my backlink quality when they add my site to their blogroll. Forum is better than blog for traffic.

[simpleonline1234]

ahhh...okay I will take the bait....

First let me say that I am not big on forum profiles for backlinks as much as I used to be in the past because they just don't seem to have the same punch as they used to.

I would say that since the ip address for every post would essentially be the same I don't see how increasing the post count would make the profile link any stronger in way of passing any type of juice to profile.

The only real benefit that I can see as far as posting 10 posts in a forum would be to attract more eyes to the link itself and to raise your actual backlink count to the search engines but after that one the other links don't hold as much weight anyways so it wouldn't do you any good to create 1000 posts in that forum vs. 1 post as far as link juice is going.

I've also found that when I create a forum profile and then go out and start creating /answering post I've had my account banned for spam.

I used to just create the profile and move on to the next one and as long as the forum link was do follow I benefited slightly from each link.

[Mike Anthony]

I think it does far more than that as people on this very forum will attest. Many people get pages indexed from dropping links in their signature here which is set up in the profile section. On some sites the crawler can't even find your link in the profile section (which is why we need all these backlink your backlink products).

Still participating on a whole heap of forums isn't scalable but thats why I like to look at the sites I work with because as some of you attested some are good for traffic , influence and business beyond leaving a backlink. it can lead to better opportunities and occasionally you stumble on a thread high In PR that you can participate on and maybe get a little bit more push.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by simpleonline1234

ahhh...okay I will take the bait....

First let me say that I am not big on forum profiles for backlinks as much as I used to be in the past because they just don't seem to have the same punch as they used to.

Agreed. I'm pretty iffy too on that post count thing . that wasn't what I meant and if i see that a site has potential for other things I don't drop a link right away in the open. I come back and network and by a few posts I find putting a sig link is not much of a problem.

[madison_avenue]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Just curious where do you derive that post count thing from?

No particular reason for 10. Forum links are low quality anyway, more links from the same IP dilute them further.

However I believe Google dislikes forum profile links with no posts. Having 10 posts makes the link more credible and legitimate and it would not be surprised if this is not factored into some algo by Google - it would be easy to do. 10 posts also make you credible in the eyes of a forum webmaster.

[simpleonline1234]

I think it does far more than that as people on this very forum will attest. Many people get pages indexed from dropping links in their signature here which is set up in the profile section. On some sites the crawler can't even find your link in the profile section (which is why we need all these backlink your backlink products).

I used those methods on another forum previously.

One great way to do that is to find a high pr forum and create a large amount of quality comments on post with your link in the sig.....whenever you want to get a page indexed you just log in and change your sig and all those previous sig links will change over to the new links. I didn't rely on that forum for backlinks but more for indexing so I didn't worry if my link count dropped slightly.

The reason that I say that I don't use forums much for indexing anymore is that I have my crawl rate up on my sites so I can get my newer pages found pretty much in the same day or the next day after creating them.

[theseoguys]

Very simple. Look at your inbound links in webmaster tools, and look at the source. Likewise, look at post count. See any correlation? Whether that is important or not, ask a high volume poster to remove their signature for a week or two and ask them if it had any negattive affect on their rankings.

[4morereferrals]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Some one mentioned this in another thread. It was an interesting point. Essentially they stated that participation on a forum makes the links in your profile stronger and increases the indexing of the link? How many sites is that worth doing on? Whats your take?

Having paid attention to the words of this particular original poster ... they stated links in your profile - not signature.


From an indexation standpoint - it stands to reason, that the more posts you have - the more links back, depending on the internal linking structure of said forum - you build more crawl-able [ is that a word ] links back to your profile.

TechSmith | Screencast.com, online video sharing, 2010-10-28_1146

But alas - who has the time for that? Especially when there is easier methods - automated of course :-)

Automated captcha breaking bots ftw!!!

[theseoguys]

I saw the original poster's message and threw in the signature example as another observation. For example, on another forum I have started frequenting, I do not have a signature (yet), and was testing this theory. I have maybe 40 posts there. My data in WMT correlates with that showing roughly 40 inbound links. I did not break it down to see if I got 2 links for 2 posts on the same thread. But it is showing inbound links relative to the number of posts.
Wherever I go, I leave as much information about me, or the site I am working on, as long as the site I am visiting allows it. If you don't want my information on your site, don't allow me to leave it there. I try to do all of this in a non spammy way of course. You will never find a blog comment from me saying, nice post, I agree, or good article.

Edit: And the only link in that particular profile is the space for "My Homepage".