Quote:
Originally Posted by Jill  It's not a problem. However, sig. links these days are generally given little-to-no weight by the search engines either.
What we do on my forum is allow only registered members to see sigs. so the search engines don't even see them this way. Many forums also put on the nofollow attribute for all sig. links if they are viewed by search engines.
We also limit the sigs. to 2 lines and 2 links and they are a smaller font size than the posts. This way they are not quite as distracting to people as sigs in other forums. But it takes a lot of time to enforce the rules and you have to be diligent about it. |
As a member of one the most popular forums on the Internet (the
Webmasterworld forums), I was surprised to see that Steve even allowed URLs in signatures.
On the WebmasterWorld forums, members may only link to their site(s) in their profile page (which is not accessible for robots, so nobody can take advantage of the huge popularity of the site for SEO purposes).
FYI:
webmasterworld/home.htm (home page of forums) = PR7
stevepavlina.com/forums (home page of forums) = PR0
Maybe this PR0 is because the forums on this site are relatively new.
We'll see how it evolves within the next months. If the Page Rank stays the same, it means there are problems with these outbound links.
FYI: SE spiders can only determine the importance of a link when it is embedded in some HTML code (for example within H1 tags). As there is no HTML code to define where a signature starts or ends, SEs cannot give "little or no value" to signature links.
PS. I realize now that I should have sent a private message to Steve instead of starting this thread. It was only meant as a friendly advice of a fellow webmaster.
