Does changing your signature affect your site ranking?

[Ace Of Shirts]

As I write this post I have about 370 posts in the Warrior Forum. All of these posts have my links to my sites in my signature.

If I were to remove one of the links from my signature I would then lose 370 links to my website. How do you think the Search Engines would react to this?

[Tad 100]

At first Google don't like web sites who lose backlinks, I know that because it happened to me. I was in the 1 place and moved down. Hard to say what exact outcome you will see, but it is nothing good.

[aygabtu]

I don't know if you would lose those or not. Google may only look at content that has changed, so all your old posts may not be affected. I know I have google email me for new content on certain keywords, and it never picks up and reports changes on signatures, only on new postings to forums, etc.

[JustaWizard]

Speaking broadly, and remember no one really knows all the "secret sauce" to any of the SE's algorithms, you may have 370 links, but remember, they're from this one site. I'm not saying all 370 are counted as one link by the engines, but it's extremely likely they know forum sig links from a link on, say, my site that is not a forum.

In short, I would not worry about removing / changing forum signature links.

Hope that helps!
David

[jhnbrwn]

well it depends on forum posting sites, if a site don't get change previous signature, it is for sure, it won't effect. If it get changes all the links or signatures, surely, it will effect the ranging as you would lose backlinks.

Regards

[paulgl]

I chuckle when people ask about search "engines," as if there
were several.

If google counted all 370, and they were gone, how could it not?

But it really depends on how authoritative and trustworthy your site
was to begin with, and, what the competition was up to.

Since we don't know that, there is no way to tell. You certainly
would see a drop in traffic if you were getting clicks from here regularly.

And we assume google liked your site to begin with, it ranked top 10,
and people were actually searching for it. That's a lot of assumptions.

Paul

[Psykryph]

Some people strongly believe that forum signatures are weak backlinks and hardly matter from an SEO standpoint. So I guess it depends on who you ask.

I personally think it depends a lot on how you do SEO. If the bulk of your SEO methods are forum signature based and you put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, it will affect your rankings negatively. Whereas if you have a good balance in backlink building, it might not matter at all.

It's the same thing as the recent Google Panda update, which impacted a lot of websites that relied heavily on article marketing. I rely a lot on article marketing myself and still do, regardless of those Google updates, because I have seen very good results from it. My websites never got impacted in the SERPs. Why? I guess it's because I don't rely exclusively on article marketing, and do many other forms of backlink building as well.

[goldhome]

I have changed the signature in many forums and has not seen any drastic drop in those websites

[jolinepenniman]

it is not a big deal for 370 but it is worsth if you could still keep the links intact