Sig links and link exchanges

[chris3471]

I've found that sig links really don't increase your page rank. The modern search engines are able to tell if the links are from a forum or not and filter them. Some will show in search results if you do a link search but not very many. If they all showed I would have about 6000+ backlinks.

Link exchanges are the way to go but you should only exchange links with related sites and they should have the same PR as you, if you link to a site that has less PR than you it will take some of your PR.

Links should also be on the same number of pages, like for instance, if I did a link exchange with this site and Forumposter only put the link on the index page then I should do the same, if I put a link in my over_all footer on all pages then Forumposter would get more out of the deal than me.

I hope that helps anyone that may have had any questions about links.

[Forum Posters]

That was very well said.  I could not have said it better myself.  However, I'm not sure that all forums are not worth posting in just for the signature backlink effect.  I understand that only some of the major search engines (Sitepoint for example) do not allow search engines to see search engine links.  Other popular forums like Digitalpoint and Namepros on the other hand do not have something in place to make signature links disapear when search engine bots visit.  I could be wrong, but that is how it appears to be from what I can tell.  Sure these links will have minimal effect, but some threads at DigitalPoint will have a PR of 4 after the next update and even though there might be 50 other links on the page, that's still not a bad backlink.   

[anti-virus]

The best way to get a backlink is to make a post and have a natural link to your website with anchor text that is relevant but not used in any other backlink to your website.  This is how Google wants you to link, naturally.   Signature and footer links that use the same anchor text over and over and appear all over the place are probably not worth nearly as much as natural links.