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.
5 Responses to “Using Your Forum Signature To Gain Traffic”
Web Site Promotions
February 11, 2009
Thanks for the tip. This is a good way to get a little extra targeted traffic for free.
|Web hosting guy
March 30, 2009
You are absolutely right! Forum signatures won’t do any good in seo. They can however make a difference if you are targeting yahoo.
I use forum signatyres for traffic mostly. If your niche is realted to the forum, just put up a nice title and you’ll get good targeted traffic
|izu mou
April 16, 2009
I simply dont like forum signature.It simply makes the member looks like a newbie and few bucks begger.besides if I joins forum on my targeted niche,other thousand of member are also there for their link promotion and there is a low tendency for link clicks…
|Matt@Sydney article marketing blog
July 4, 2009
Thanks for this great tip.
Actually, what you said about there being very little SEO benefit from forums is something I suspected already, but wasn’t sure of. So I will try this “question” approach.
Still, I do think that forums are well worth participating in regardless of the direct traffic benefits. The reason is because they are a great way of creating new unique content. That is, if you just answer some questions on a subject you’ll have the makings of an article pretty soon. Rewrite it so it’s unique and post it on your blog and you’ll eventually get search engine traffic as a result.
Matt@Sydney article marketing blog’s last blog post..Advanced operators for keyword selection
|Petra Weiss
August 12, 2009
Oh, this seems so simple! It does make sense, though. After all, when you get to a forum and look at peoples posts, and you see 4 or more lines of links after their post, you get turned off already – mostly you don’t even look at them any more because you can’t be bothered! Hm, I’m off to change a few signatures, I guess….
|Petra Weiss´s last blog ..Get Website Traffic