Promoting sites (blogs) in signatures

[Frans]

Many frequent posters on these forums promote their site (blog) in their signature.
They get a link to their site with every message they post, so it's in their own interest to post frequently.

I believe that if you would forbid URL's in signatures, we would have more on topic and relevant postings.

If people would like to promote their site, they can do that always via their Profile.

What do you think?

[Roman Budzowski]

I'm new to this forums so I don't know yet how many posts are off topic. Although I like reasonable freedom in signatures and as long as signature is not too big (long) I don't care what anyone puts in it.

best,
Roman

[Cron]

I'm a recovering forum junkie. I have seen plenty of forums with and without signatures. People go off topic on every forum I have seen.

I generally like sigs, it is like wearing a t-shirt or having a bumper sticker. It tells you a little bit what people are about. I can tell when people are posting just to sell something, so I just ignore those sigs.


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[skydust]

i think you have no real basis on which to place that argument.
can you prove to us that the signatures are directly related to the amount of off topic posts on this forum? when you can, come back again. as for now, you are trying to prevent an imaginary effect.

i like the signatures, as it tells us more about who that person is. if someone does what you suggest, that can be dealt with on an individual basis, not mass control.

[Frans]

I'm not against signatures, I only question why it is necessary to allow URLs in a signature.

People can always link to their site from within their Profile.

If I would be in Steve's place, I would consult a SEO specialist in order to know what the effect of thousands of outbound links is on my sites PR (Google Page Rank).

[Roman Budzowski]

Originally Posted by Frans

I'm not against signatures, I only question why it is necessary to allow URLs in a signature.

It's not necessary, but it is so much easier for us. Some people edit their signatures often and put there latest blog post with a direct link to it. Not just the website, but direct link to other interesting stuff. Profile lets you use just one link and very often it's not enough.

best,
Roman

[TheColonel]

Isn't there an ignore function?

[Dharma]

In the UserCP under edit options you can turn off seeing signatures.

[impaul99]

I strongly disagree with your statement. I post a lot on this forum and I don't do it just to promote my blog. Meaning, I wouldn't just post a message with no value, simply to expose a link to my site. I think your arguement *might* have some basis if people were posting messages like "Yup." or "I agree." which provide no value at all, and are just used to expose a link to their site, but that can be easily reported and disallowed by the moderators.

Outside of that, leave the links to our sites alone. I spent a lot of time setting up my blog and writing the articles on there and I'm proud of it. I'm not going to shy away from providing a link to it to anyone who's interested in seeing who I am. If you don't want to click on it, then don't, nobody is forcing you.

The arguement you have is baseless in the blogosphere community because one of the reasons blogging became so popular in the first place was BECAUSE people allowed cross-linking to happen. It is the whole concept of GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE. In fact, one of the very FIRST things I did when I setup my own blog was to give Steve Pavlina a link right off of my home page because of the value I've gotten from his blog. And YES I am aware of the SEO implications of outbound links. Blogging isn't about SEO efficiency, it's about helping people. Steve allows URL links because he knows they help people and his interest is to help people, because he knows that by helping people he helps himself. ie. If my website becomes more successful and gets more traffic, the link to his website on my home page gets more exposure and more people click on his site too and that's of value to him.

[Frans]

Originally Posted by impaul99

Blogging isn't about SEO efficiency, it's about helping people.

The breakthrough of blogging came a few years ago, when Adsense ads became available for "content providers" (June 2003).
The webmasters who provided free content BEFORE June 2003, were idealists because they earned nothing with their site, on the contrary: they had to pay to share their knowledge with other people.
These people had the right to say: "it's about helping people".

Would you proceed with your blog if you wouldn't earn a penny with your site?...
If your answer is "no", then please refrain from statements as "it's about helping people".

[Cron]

Originally Posted by Dharma

In the UserCP under edit options you can turn off seeing signatures.

That should end this conversation.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by Frans

The breakthrough of blogging came a few years ago, when Adsense ads became available for "content providers" (June 2003).
The webmasters who provided free content BEFORE June 2003, were idealists because they earned nothing with their site, on the contrary: they had to pay to share their knowledge with other people.
These people had the right to say: "it's about helping people".

Would you proceed with your blog if you wouldn't earn a penny with your site?...
If your answer is "no", then please refrain from statements as "it's about helping people".

Dude, I just threw ad-sense on my site and a "donate" button to allow people to contribute if they want to. I haven't pushed to monetize my site or to try to make a killing from it. In fact, since I launched it in April which is 9 months ago I've made a WHOPPING $16.32 in adwords clicks! Yet, knowing that I'm still writing articles this week. Do you really think I've spent 9 months of my time to make $16? I can make that in a matter of minutes at my job, why would I waste my time? The reason I run my blog is to help people first and foremost. If it generates money, great, I'm not going to complain but that's not my primary focus.

[Flame]

I'll click on the signature blogs of posters on this forum who I find insightful or who have had interesting experiences.

What annoys me is seeing "bait and switch" posts where the *only* line is something like "hey I talk about this in my blog/article/etc," which ends up being tangential to the topic. No problem to cite your blog if something's relevant, but give a little more info about your opinion if you expect us to bite...

edit: "you" refers to the bait & switchers, not impaul99 (whose site I do visit).

[Frans]

Originally Posted by impaul99

since I launched it in April which is 9 months ago I've made a WHOPPING $16.32 in adwords clicks! Yet, knowing that I'm still writing articles this week. Do you really think I've spent 9 months of my time to make $16?

You are a smart person, so I'm sure you have a planning for the long term.
I wish you all success with your blog.

[Michael Chui]

I pimp my journal for the publicity, not for the money. Actually, if I could make money from my journal, that would be awesome... but it's not going to happen because I'm not willing to figure out how to do it.

I want the publicity because my ideas don't receive enough criticism. This is either because I'm always right (and that's hard to buy even for me), or because not enough/the wrong people are reading them. So I want to get my ideas out there because, if I'm right, then other people should know about them, and if I'm wrong, I'd like to know that.

I also started in 2002. And it's a journal, not a blog.

[Jill]

If I would be in Steve's place, I would consult a SEO specialist in order to know what the effect of thousands of outbound links is on my sites PR (Google Page Rank).

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.

[Cron]

As someone who insists upon his own opinion I welcome Frans to express his own views and hope people do not give him snarky replies if they do not agree.

I think Steve P knows what he is doing internet-wise. The dude was a games programmer, one of the hardest tech jobs you can do.

As was mentioned, everyone can choose to turn off seeing signatures for themselves.

I haven't seen a problem with people posting off topic or giving gratuitious replies just for an excuse to post.

[Frans]

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.

[Jill]

Maybe this PR0 is because the forums on this site are relatively new.

Not maybe. Definitely. As a WMW member, you should know that the Google toolbar is only updated once every 3 or 4 months. This forum does indeed have PageRank, there's just no way to see it since the toolbar has not been updated since it's gone live.

Every page has PageRank if it's indexed in Google whether or not you see a zero or gray Google PR on the toolbar.

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.

Huh?

That's complete gobbledy-gook. Spiders can and do read, index, and determine the importance of any link that is written in "a href" format. The importance of any link is determined by how important the page the link is on is deemed. That's the nature of true PageRank (not the one you see in the toolbar).

[Frans]

I'll try again...

Originally Posted by Jill

sig. links these days are generally given little-to-no weight by the search engines either.

Do you agree that this is only possible if a SE spider can make a distinction between a link in a posting and a link in a signature?

[Jill]

Originally Posted by Frans

I'll try again...

Do you agree that this is only possible if a SE spider can make a distinction between a link in a posting and a link in a signature?

I believe that the search engines can easily spot sig. links because there are generally multiple ones on the same page, as well as across numerous pages of a site.

Sig. links easily leave footprints, if you will, in part because forums themselves are easy enough to be spotted as being forums.

[Michael Chui]

Originally Posted by Jill

I believe that the search engines can easily spot sig. links because there are generally multiple ones on the same page, as well as across numerous pages of a site.

Sig. links easily leave footprints, if you will, in part because forums themselves are easy enough to be spotted as being forums.

If you look at the source code for the forum, signatures are marked by comments.

[Cron]

I just went into my control panel and turned signatures off.

The boards seems a lot nicer now.

[scottyp]

I think people should be allowed to have urls in their sig, but the sigs shouldn't be more than two lines.

[Matthew Doucette]

I dislike signature rules.

I like learning more about people by their links, without having to check their profiles. Links should be allowed.

FWIW, I vote to have no rules at all on signatures, until it becomes an obvious problem such as using huge images that slow the forums down. Then implement more restrictive rules at that time. Trust us first!

[Lucas]

Signatures are fine with me, I treat them like I treat ads, click on ones that interest me. No ones sigs here have been intrusive, so why not let people self market? Some people may connect with products and blogs they genuinely want to see, and few of us are spam marketers...

No harm no foul imo.

[scottyp]

I'd suggest anyone who is looking to promote their blog check out this post I made a while back

Post your blog, and talk about it

[Cron]

Originally Posted by Matthew Doucette

I dislike signature rules.

I like learning more about people by their links, without having to check their profiles. Links should be allowed.

I like that the software offers options for everyone to have what they like. People can post their signatures and people who do not care to see them can turn them off for their view of the site.

IMHO web board software should go further in this direction.....allow users post whatever they want, but give the reader the power to filter his/her view of the content to his/her liking.

[Kristoffer]

Thanks for a good question Frans.

Sorry about my (obnoxious) sig with four links in it. Many of the threads in this forum is about blogging and internet entrepreneurship so I post my sigs, and I want to see other peoples too to see what they are up to.

In my experience, not a lot of traffic comes to my blogs this way. For high volume traffic I would rather recommend stumbleupon or digg etc.

What annoys me is a really long sig. Specially if the msg is short, like "yes, I agree" and then the sig is quoting half the bible. If it is the same color I find it difficult to distinguish the msg from the sig sometimes. Links in sigs I have no problem with. Show me your links!

[Phil Newton]

I quite like links in signatures, as I'm more likely to visit their website from a signature link than a profile link. If the post itself is of no value, I probably won't be interested in their signature links, so it doesn't really bother me.