Forum Link Building: Do The Backlinks Count?
Lot of people doubt whether forum link building works or not. Some smart ones are even engaged in full time venture of selling forum backlinks preying on unsuspecting link builders that are new to the industry. Save your time and/or money on such ineffectual link building means as it purely doesn't work.
It might come to a surprise to some as it is a bit of a general conception that it is feasible to drive a boat full of backlinks to a site or a blog with forum link building process. If we look at few key information on link building and how Google weights the backlinks, we will concur that such process is nothing but total waste of time.
A forum post usually has 20 comments per page on average with some forums having as much as 40 comments. Where some forums impose restriction on signature links by enabling only 2 links or so, others don't inflict any such restriction on signature links meaning you can have as many links as you want on your signature.
We understand by now that the quality of the backlinks is more important than the sheer volume of link. There are several components in assigning the value of the links but one most essential factor is that more external links a page has, less value per link is transferred. If a forum page has on average 20 comments with each member having 4 signature links, then each specific thread page has about 80 external links just form the signatures. Not to point out the advertisings forum admins place on the website to monetize the forum which could be as much as 20+ outgoing links per page.
One more point to bear in mind is that a new thread page only stays on the front page of the forum for a brief period of time. It is often not viable for Google to index that specific page and then crawl each and every single link found on that pages within this small window which means lot of your links will not even be credited by Google!
So as you can realize, forum link building has hardly any effect in getting your site's link popularity increased. So the question is, out of all the link building methods available out there that can support your site rank well, why would you use a approach that will produce no result?
When it comes to using the forum backlinks as a promotional approach, it is important to come across related forums that are reputable and very active. More people visit a particular forum, more opportunity for you to promote your site/blog, and higher your chances are for visits. Do not just stay active with one single forum but find several and separate your time between all. This way you are presenting your site to a broader audience having a mixture of different mindset. You can bring together the referral data to see which forum sending you how much traffic based on a given number of posts, you then can figure out where to spend most of your time.
Read more on Forum Link Building or visit the author's Link Building service site.