Signature links
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aus11
Top Contributor
I was reading the updated Google 'seo' guidelines and it specifically mentions them as negative (if they are not 'no follow')
EDIT: I was lazy and didn't provide a link. Here is the link to the page referenced: Google's Opinion on Link Schemes
EDIT: I was lazy and didn't provide a link. Here is the link to the page referenced: Google's Opinion on Link Schemes
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payattention
Archived Member
I don't believe there is any negative impact by having a forum signature on a few forums that you're active on. That is very different to having an assortment of profiles spread across 50,000 forums of which many are infested with spam as they're abandoned.
The nature of the Internet is links and having a sig link here would make good sense if you provide a related service or product. On their own, the links won't help you to rank but a quality site is often discussed and linked to in a variety of ways including forums. No need to go all tin foil hat on what Google says.
The nature of the Internet is links and having a sig link here would make good sense if you provide a related service or product. On their own, the links won't help you to rank but a quality site is often discussed and linked to in a variety of ways including forums. No need to go all tin foil hat on what Google says.
One thing I've wondered about is how Google recognises them as signature links? Is it just on the number of links from a forum?
I mean a website being discussed on a forum with a link to it would be seen as a positive from Google right? And if that website was mentioned several times throughout the forum (say as Netfleet or Drop would be on here), even better.
So can Google differentiate between 20 links to Netfleet, say, during forum discussions and sig links on a poster who has posted 20 times?
I mean a website being discussed on a forum with a link to it would be seen as a positive from Google right? And if that website was mentioned several times throughout the forum (say as Netfleet or Drop would be on here), even better.
So can Google differentiate between 20 links to Netfleet, say, during forum discussions and sig links on a poster who has posted 20 times?
payattention
Archived Member
I don't think it's hard for them to recognise links on a forum compared to say a wordpress website. If you look at vBulletin - which this forum is running - the layout is going to be somewhat similar to the many other forums out there. I don't think they trust one of a few individual signals though as they can be too easily manipulated.
I would think things such as avatars, url structure, similarity between page layouts, that every thread has links back to user profiles, avatars, quote.gif buttons and then the obvious things like Posting rules, BB code being used in messages and so forth act as a signal or heuristic that Google can use to classify websites.
Given some of these features are intrinsic to a forum, lets water it right down and say they maybe do an IF forum THEN count links in a specific way. I've read but cannot remember where that they have patents for some type of web OCR and they probably use the above plus a combination of things such as how frequently those links appear on other websites and other forums, if the links from surrounding pages are similar or if the topics completely differ and are found on non-english sites (as is often the case for forum profile builders like scrapebox). What's the average weight of an active forum with conversations to the percentage of profiles with links and what percentage of those profiles on average link to personal and/or commercial sites. No doubt a spammy forum is going to have a much higher weight towards forum links than conversation and probably many thousands of more members. Why are so many members on this forum with links in their profile if the forum is not very active? Maybe just one of many signals they've come up with. Does conversation continue on after this member with forum links has posted or do more and more members give short replies with even more profile links. Does this often occur or are the links shortly removed when the crawler comes back? You can look at those things on an individual level and the total sum of all the data they've crawled and then write some sort of algorithm to figure it out automatically.
They probably also have things to check for false positives. Let's say the forum links you post here look spammy given the above rules, a double check might be something as simple as comparing and checking for similar circumstances occurring on other forums. If it doesn't occur elsewhere, it's less likely to actually be be spam even though at face value it may appear to be so.
I still believe they're far more likely to discount links than penalise for them but it appears as a penalty because in the past you may have received some benefit from these types of links but that has now bene removed (probably not entirely, they're just better at detecting legitimate versus contrived) which gives the appearance of a penalty and thus people say profile links will get you penalised.
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I just wanted to add a few extra thoughts.
Let's just take the above image with your links as an example. If they have some sort of webpage OCR, they can visual what is actually surrounding your links. That on it's own is enough to identify those links as forum links but no doubt they would use an assortment of techniques to arrive at that conclusion. From a technical standpoint, they'd look at the code and see that that too matches other information they have accumulated. Then you take that small bit of information and compare it across the entire Internet and years of data gathering from probably millions of forums across all sorts of topics and you'd arrive at some sort of average that reveals whether it's a forum link and whether it's legit or spammy. When I say "they", I'm talking about whatever algorithm they've written to detect this. Obviously there is some mathematical answer you can arrive at to explain the nature of these links when you have all the data they do.
I can't really clearly explain these ideas as they are quite abstract but no doubt the people that write these algorithms at Google are very clever and probably have come up with some ideas that are inconceivable for even the best of us.
I would think things such as avatars, url structure, similarity between page layouts, that every thread has links back to user profiles, avatars, quote.gif buttons and then the obvious things like Posting rules, BB code being used in messages and so forth act as a signal or heuristic that Google can use to classify websites.
Given some of these features are intrinsic to a forum, lets water it right down and say they maybe do an IF forum THEN count links in a specific way. I've read but cannot remember where that they have patents for some type of web OCR and they probably use the above plus a combination of things such as how frequently those links appear on other websites and other forums, if the links from surrounding pages are similar or if the topics completely differ and are found on non-english sites (as is often the case for forum profile builders like scrapebox). What's the average weight of an active forum with conversations to the percentage of profiles with links and what percentage of those profiles on average link to personal and/or commercial sites. No doubt a spammy forum is going to have a much higher weight towards forum links than conversation and probably many thousands of more members. Why are so many members on this forum with links in their profile if the forum is not very active? Maybe just one of many signals they've come up with. Does conversation continue on after this member with forum links has posted or do more and more members give short replies with even more profile links. Does this often occur or are the links shortly removed when the crawler comes back? You can look at those things on an individual level and the total sum of all the data they've crawled and then write some sort of algorithm to figure it out automatically.
They probably also have things to check for false positives. Let's say the forum links you post here look spammy given the above rules, a double check might be something as simple as comparing and checking for similar circumstances occurring on other forums. If it doesn't occur elsewhere, it's less likely to actually be be spam even though at face value it may appear to be so.
I still believe they're far more likely to discount links than penalise for them but it appears as a penalty because in the past you may have received some benefit from these types of links but that has now bene removed (probably not entirely, they're just better at detecting legitimate versus contrived) which gives the appearance of a penalty and thus people say profile links will get you penalised.
-----
I just wanted to add a few extra thoughts.
Let's just take the above image with your links as an example. If they have some sort of webpage OCR, they can visual what is actually surrounding your links. That on it's own is enough to identify those links as forum links but no doubt they would use an assortment of techniques to arrive at that conclusion. From a technical standpoint, they'd look at the code and see that that too matches other information they have accumulated. Then you take that small bit of information and compare it across the entire Internet and years of data gathering from probably millions of forums across all sorts of topics and you'd arrive at some sort of average that reveals whether it's a forum link and whether it's legit or spammy. When I say "they", I'm talking about whatever algorithm they've written to detect this. Obviously there is some mathematical answer you can arrive at to explain the nature of these links when you have all the data they do.
I can't really clearly explain these ideas as they are quite abstract but no doubt the people that write these algorithms at Google are very clever and probably have come up with some ideas that are inconceivable for even the best of us.
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