It’s no secret that forums are a great way of gaining some easy back links for your website. Whether you try to sneak a subtle link in to a post or you go for the more standard approach of stuffing your signature with a few links it’s a very easy technique. My question is this, just how effective is it? When I talk about linking being effective I mean in 2 regards, firstly in terms of SEO benefit and secondly in terms of traffic.
Now I’m going to come out and say it. I don’t think forum signature links have any real benefit for the SEO of your website, certainly not if you’re targeting Google. Think about it logically, the average forum thread will contain dozens of posts per page, chances are that each post will have a signature and at least 1 link. Add that on to the huge number of other links that standard forum scripts produce (per page) and you’ve got a page that will be very top heavy when you compare outbound to inbound links. That’s why traditionally most forums have a tiny amount of page rank relative to the amount of unique content they hold. So whilst using a forum signature is a good way of getting quickly indexed I think that the positive effect from any links will be negligible in pushing you up those search rankings.
What I really want to concentrate on is the second benefit, attracting traffic with your signature. If you’re anything like me the first thing you do when you’ve posted enough on a forum to warrant a signature is to go and create one that is brimming with links. Looking back my average forum signature contains 4 links to my various sites! Whilst this does give me that tiny (if any) amount of SEO benefit the number of visitors that have followed my forum signature links has always been next to none. Well that was up until a couple of days ago. Here’s the stats of referrals from the Digital Point forums going all the way back to September. You’ll notice the sudden increase in the last 2 days.
You’re probably wondering what I changed? It goes like this…a few days ago I enrolled on Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind course. It’s jammed with content and whilst a lot of the early stuff is what I consider for beginners even in those early lessons there are a few gems. I’m really glad I took the time to go through those lessons in full. So onto my change. It was simple really, I removed my “standard” forum signature and changed it into a single sentence signature. All I did was ask a simple question and in that question embedded a link back to my blog. Of course I lose the tiny tiny amount of linkage benefit to my other sites but just that simple change is bringing another 10+ visitors a day and that’s from just one forum. I’m not even really posting much, at all. How many webmaster forums are there out there? The answers a lot and yesterday I spent some time changing my signature on a few more. Bingo, another 50-60 visitors a day.
It’s a nice little trick and one I’ll be using in the other niches in which I operate because if there’s one thing you can be sure of it is that there’s no shortage of forums out there! My problem up until now was how to draw traffic from them.
10 Responses to “Using Your Forum Signature To Gain Traffic”
menj
January 30, 2011
I’ve tried this before, but traffic from forum signatures are close to negligible. Not much benefit from that too.
|menj´s last ..Mark Zuckerberg meets Jesse Eisenberg
Money Schemes
January 30, 2011
This is my 3rd most popular post of all time, all from referral traffic from forum sigs. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
|Alberto
February 2, 2011
I’m not sure I understood your technique. Instead of a usual singnature you diguise a link to your blog in a question relevant to the forum topic?
|Alberto´s last ..I migliori forum e siti per l’usato fotografico
Money Schemes
February 3, 2011
Instead of listing a great big bunch of websites think of it more as an Adwords ad. Try to link them to something relevant to the forum they are on in an interesting, concise way.
|UnfalaKam
September 23, 2011
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