Forum profile section or signature line as backlink
-
Hi,
Forum profile section or signature line as backlink VS Answering a question and giving a related post URl as the answer is better?
I have the above question on which would be better
Would a signature or website name in the profile is valuable then a link to your site where information is available?
Does Google consider both as spam/blackhat?
Thanks
-
The idea in engaging with people in forums is to drive traffic, become a source of information and eventually achieve sales. been there done it.
Do not focus solely on link building, SEO now is more of a complete digital marketing package than link building.
Unfortunately I do not remember the source I saw this but I am 99,9% sure that signature links might be penalised by Google so i wouldnt go with that direction (should you insist in pure link building ofcourse).
-
Thanks but my questions would be will answering in forums and providing links of no use?
-
If I were to chose, I'd say profiles are better than signatures. They're less pushy and less likely to be harmful to your site's rankings.
-
Direct traffic is the goal
But will the Algorithmic benefit hurt?
-
What is the primary benefit you're looking to get? Algorithmic benefit? Direct traffic? Branding?
-
So forum posting is not a good medium?
Helping members on sites and then giving an exact URL which has relevant info?
Among these 3 and blog commenting which do you suggest
-
More often than not, signatures and links from profiles are nofollowed so you probably won't get any link juice from either. If I were to chose, I'd say profiles are better than signatures because it's better to have one link coming from a stronger page than a bunch of links with the same anchor text coming from a bunch of weaker pages. If you have a page of content on your site that would be important to your target audience, you'd be better off not using either of those methods, as they're on the spammy side. You'd be better of promoting through social media channels.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What about a No-record backlink in the view of bing
I have a vulnerability - when I make a backlink as a piece of SEO in some site when I inspected comparative couple of days after. It hasn't documented and I checked its robots record. It showing up Customer trained professional: Mediapartners-Google Disallow: User-Agent: * Disallow: However, is this make any backlink maintain or just this with the ultimate objective of not requesting in google. I make it clear - "Is such a backlink my site FreeDombra maintain my SEO activity or Not?" In this No-record site.
Technical SEO | | Hadia7680 -
Will getting backlinks to landing page from low quality sites negatively affect SEO?
I've recently started an initiative at my company to get our customers to publish a blog post about our company and to include a link to a landing page which sits on a subdomain attached to our main domain. The reason for directing visitors to the post to a landing page is to help with conversion. I've recently been thinking that couldn't the backlinks to this landing page from our customers' blogs (generally small sites) have a negative impact on the overall SEO of my companies domain? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JustinButlion0 -
Backlinks from unindexed pages - disavow ?
Hi I was analyzing my sites's backlinks and see a lot of the domains are not indexed by google.
Technical SEO | | VaiSam
I assume google has unindexed them - may be these domains are penalized. Should I request removal of my site's link from these pages ? What is the recommended approach in such a case? Thank you for your inputs.0 -
Site dropped after I removed spammy KW-stuffed section from homepage
An SEO newbie. I took a sabbatical from my site for 10 months for personal reasons & I'm now coming back to it for the first time and facing a number of issues that I'd appreciate some advice on. 1) In the past week, my rankings for my main keywords have suddenly plummeted from ~#7 - #8 to about #25. The only thing I've done in that time is sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and clean up a spammy-looking keyword-stuffed section at the foot of my homepage. (It read: Red keyword | blue keyword | green keyword | yellow keyword ... 20 times). I've kept the links (to internal pages of my site) but removed keywords. I've no social presence whatsoever. No Twitter, Facebook, Digg, G+, Google Places, nothing -- but I can't imagine this is behind the sudden drop. 2) Last year my rankings start to fall in late April. But for the first two months or so the drop was only from #1 to #2 - #3. I put it down to Penguin as my backlink profile is not ideal. About 5 years ago some SEO got me a mass of sitewide blog footer links with exact-match anchors -- some of which still remain. (Some domains have 750-plus links pointing back to my site). I've a sitewide banner (2,500 pages) on a site with a related theme to mine. I've loads of links from article directory sites (from when I knew no better). * Question: In Google Webmaster Tools I have not (yet?) received an unnatural links warning. Should I still clean up the links with the Link Disavow tool?
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Posting on Forums for SEO benefit
Hi Is it beneficial to participate on forums in our market place to help become an authority in Googles eyes? I assume even if we don't get links it still useful in terms of co-citation... Thanks
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
We just fixed a Meta refresh, unified our link profile and now our rankings are going crazy
Crazy in a bad way!I am hoping that perhaps some of you have experienced this scenario before and can shed some light on what might be happening.Here is what happened:We recently fixed a meta refresh that was on our site's homepage. It was completely fragmenting our link profile. All of our external links were being counted towards one URL, and our internal links were counting for the other URL. In addition to that, our most authoritative URL, because it was subject to a meta refresh, was not passing any of its authority to our other pages.Here is what happened to our link profile:Total External Links: Before - 2,757 After - **4,311 **Total Internal Links: Befpre - 125 After - 3,221
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
Total Links: Before - 2,882 After - 7,532Yeah....huge change. Great right? Well, I have been tracking a set of keywords that were ranking from spots 10-30 in Google. There are about 66 keywords in the set. I started tracking them because at MozCon last July Fabio Riccotta suggested that targeting keywords showing up on page 2 or 3 of the results might be easier to improve than terms that were on the bottom of page 1. So, take a look at this. The first column shows where a particular keyword ranked on 11/8 and the second column shows where it is ranking today and the third column shows the change. For obvious reasons I haven't included the keywords.11/8 11/14 Change****10 44 -34
10 26 -16
10 28 -18
10 34 -24
10 25 -15
15 29 -14
16 33 -17
16 32 -16
17 24 -7
17 53 -36
17 41 -24
18 27 -9
19 42 -23
19 35 -16
19 - Not in top 200
19 30 -11
19 25 -6
19 43 -24
20 33 -13
20 41 -21
20 34 -14
21 46 -25
21 - Not in top 200
21 33 -12
21 40 -19
21 61 -40
22 46 -24
22 35 -13
22 46 -24
23 51 -28
23 49 -26
24 43 -19
24 47 -23
24 45 -21
24 39 -15
25 45 -20
25 50 -25
26 39 -13
26 118 - 92
26 30 -4
26 139 -113
26 57 -31
27 48 -21
27 47 -20
27 47 -20
27 45 -18
27 48 -21
27 59 -32
27 55 -28
27 40 -13
27 48 -21
27 51 -24
27 43 -16
28 66 -38
28 49 -21
28 51 -23
28 58 -30
29 58 -29
29 43 -14
29 41 -12
29 49 -20
29 60 -31
30 42 -12
31 - Not in top 200
31 59 -28
31 68 -37
31 53 -22Needless to say, this is exactly the opposite of what I expected to see after fixing the meta refresh problem. I wouldn't think anything of normal fluctuation, but every single one of these keywords moved down, almost consistently 20-25 spots. The further down a keyword was to begin with, it seems the further it dropped.What do you make of this? Could Google be penalizing us because our link profile changed so dramatically in a short period of time? I should say that we have never taken part in spammy link-building schemes, nor have we ever been contacted by Google with any kind of suspicious link warnings. We've been online since 1996 and are an e-commerce site doing #RCS. Thanks all!0 -
Backlinks to unique login pages
Hi There, This has turned out to be slightly long winded! Congrats to anyone who manages to follow what I am on about and cheers to anyone that can help! The company I work for has several hundred backlinks from customer sites (authority sites) that link to their unique login pages (e.g. customer.oursitesname.com/unique-identifier). From these pages they can access our learning platform. For maximum SEO benefits we have been trying to think of a way to get these customers to link to our start page. This is what we have come up with. Customers would link to us using a URL with this format www.oursitesname.com/#customer-unique-identifier. (I have read somewhere that Google “ignores” everything after a #). This URL would then cause a Jscript pop-up or drop-down to open. The pop-up or drop-down would be hidden for the normal user and only be visible for users that visit over the unique URL. The pop-up or drop-down would be unique for each customer (mainly for branding purposes). The pop-up or drop-down would contain signup/login fields. So now to my question, will this get us in trouble with Google? Is there a better solution than this? Are we over thinking it and should we just do something like this: www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/unique -identifier and set www.oursitesname.com/customer-login/ as the canonical? Does the Google bot get suspicious of hundreds of canonical tags pointing back to the one URL? Thanks in advance! Henry
Technical SEO | | hnydnn0 -
Will using https across our entire site hurt our external backlinks?
Our site is secured throughout, so it loads sitewide as https. It is canonicalized properly - any attempt to load an existing page as http will force to https. My concern is with backlinks. We've put a lot of effort into social media, so we're getting some nice blog linkage. The problem is that the links are generally to http rather than https (understandable, since that's the default for most web users). The site still loads with no problem, but my concern is that since a redirect doesn't transfer all the link juice across, we're leaking some perfectly good link credit. From the standpoint of backlinkage, are we harming ourselves by making the whole site secure by default? The site presently isn't very big, but I'm looking at adding hundreds of new pages to the site, so if we're going to make the change, now is the time to do so. Let me know what you think!
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0