Forum Signatures

I have this newly made site and i want the spiders to visit it already. would signatures in forums such as Webdigity help? or theres a "no follow" tag so it will not get spidered.

and i was about to check my site in copyscape and i wasnt able to. it seems the 20x search limit per month for a site was already used up. and i just had it online just yesterday and the only incoming link was from my signature in this forum.

so if any of you checked my site in copyscape yesterday, please share what you found out. the articles there are all solicited from local writers here. i just want to make sure that they didnt just get it from the internet.

thanks...

Your sig here is not visible in search engines. I have turned this off some months ago to reduce spam and inrelevant content.

On the other side all the links in our forum are search engine friendly.

I would suggest you to submit your site to a few directories and sites like delicious. This will help the site get indexed fast.

in this thread:

http://www.webdigity.com/index.php/topic,760.new.Re%3A+Free+and+paid+advertising.html

 you mentioned text links. are these spiderable?

Yes those are search engine friendly but this thread is for the topsites directory.

If you want to get advertising on webdigity check this instead :

http://www.webdigity.com/index.php/topic,5574.0.Webdigity+offer+promotion+packages.html

Was rereading some of the old threads and noticed this, using del.icio.us wouldn't do you any good it as it uses no-follow , great for traffic, but useless for rankings.

You are right, but nofollow links can still help you with getting indexed :)

Del.icio.us is an od creature individual pages have high page rank yet they defy most of the rules for "good content" I guess when you are owned by a search engine you can get away with such things. I'm sure Yahoo is using the results, and keywords to help in their search engine, to many odd keyword pairs, but I've noticed Google doing the same is del.icio.us the next DMOZ I wonder?

That would be very reasonable. Search engines are about rankings. Google gone to the first place because they created successfully algorithms to rank web sites. Now the internet community has already created a better way to rank sites which is the user driven web sites (digg,stumbleupon,etc.)

Now the only part that of the puzzle left, is someone to connect those two :)

I have posted here before that I believe that this is the future of search engines, and as far as I know some of the social bookmark sites (eg. delicious) are going to create their own search engines in the near future.

Even if links in your signature aren't viewable to search engines, they are still a good idea to have, for all the people looking at that forum where your signature is.

-- Phil

i target the serps. thats where traffic is aplenty. thou forum sigs can help, its not that relevant.

But with other forum, is it still sipdered by SE?

yes here is slightly different as signatures don't appear to guests, but most forum software they do and normally signatures don't have a no follow though it depends on the software and the forum.

yes, but don't think this is necessarily good. A ton of unrelated links can really harm your SERP rankings :)

so now members with 200+ post will have their signatures viewable by guests and spiderable as well. whats really beneficial to me is the spider thing. you have really given me the motivation to be MORE active. really appreacite it!

if this is a problem you should think about to show all links to the search engines, maybe you need to add the nofollow relation.

I think its not really good for this community if the organic traffic went down because of some "arcade links" ;)  in thousands of posts

that was supposed to be our reward, the spiderable links.

yes I know, but if user with a lot of not related link lower webdigities position in the SERPS of google its not a good thing

check for example the forum webmasterworld dot com, they remove every not related link from the pots and they are excellent indexed by google

if it is not good for the community coz it will affect our rankings, maybe Nik can just give us one live link in a prominent place like in the homepage.

or we need to whitelist the links first?

I remember that the forums on devshed only shows the signature one for one thread

how does that work?

Very few forums disallow signature links, and none suffer any major penalties, indeed most forums are crawled regularly so having a new site in your signature is a great way to get it crawled fast. Certainly I have seen no penalties relating to off topic relevancy I suspect that the large amount of relevant traffic helps, unlike a static site a forum is dynamic, and always updating so its relevancy is based more on trust authority then anything else. I can see a time when relevancy would be an issue, a new forum could have problems if its posted to irregularly and spam forums where they have been over run by irrelevant links.

that is good to hear. thanks for the info tim.

that makes sense...

So we should keep this the way it is, right? :)

Sometimes is really hard to understand what the community wants, I guess :)

I'm not the community, but I like to see more than 20 active members every minute, to get this we need organic traffic

You are right. I wont let anything ruin the rankings that this site gets, but what I found in time is that a community actually promoted by its members. So the first thing is to keep members motivated and rewarded for their contribution.

On the other hand I don't think this change will have any impact to the SERPs. I guess it is too soon to speak for that. So for the moment we will leave it as is, and later we can see what we can do, right?

yeah. if it turns out bad, you can always return it to nofollow. thanks Nik! i really appreciate the spiderable links.


sure thing. and you know what, all the banner ad credits for the banner i use for my topic posts i will give to Webdigity with my referral link.

Really? I appreciate that :)

I've got links to here from my blog and my personal site's "Interests" page. I'm hoping it helps out this forum, cause it's one of my favorites. I've also noticed that my traffic has risen substantially since I decided to become a "Community Supporter" and paid for a link on the front page. A couple thousand ranks in Alexa might not sound much, but to me, it's better than staying put. 

I am glad that this worked for you. Hope it will work for everyone else here :)

It also helps that I'm running a 25 member referral contest, I suppose. According to my host, I've used up 8% of my bandwith (30GB/month) already, and I've only had the site with him since January. :D