I have heard that forum signatures helps in SEO for the sites, by getting backlinks from the forums. How true it is? can a site be optimized by forum signature links alone? How many forum signatures would be needed to get good pagerank and traffic.

You would need a few posts on a forum that has a lot of search engine traffic. You would need to have your signature enabled and post in a few different subforums of the forum.

I could not imagine needing any more than one link in the forum signature before the forum signature is cached into Google and becomes a part of the search engine results for those looking for a specific keyword that your signature might have in it. I think that trying to optimize the traffic for a site on only a forum signature being a little too optimistic, but if you visit several forums, you may find yourself getting a lot of traffic from the various forums because of your signature. I just would not depend on the forum signature alone.

HI,
i also heard that it helps...thats why i have my sites in the signature below...hope it helps!!

Signature links will help is SEO to index your new pages quickly and it help to boost PR but as far as my experience tell,it wont help in SERP coz u will have back links from non relevant pages. so google will not give more weight to those links for ranking.

They do help in getting Pagerank and getting indexed as Jignesh stated above.

One thing I would like to add is that Jignesh is right that it might be irrelevant links. So the SERP's will not get affected. But in some cases like say we have a domains forum and you have a domains blog then it might help you a bit more. It just applies to the relevant themes.

Moreover many forums including ours have rules that competitors links are not allowed. So sometimes you cannot even get backlinks from other forums if you are yourself running a forum.

It never hurts to have a handy link in your signature at any forum, but don't depend on it as a major part of your marketing strategy. I would say that advertising by forum signatures is a nice thing to know; I would hardly call it important in the grand scheme of things from the looks of how search engines work.

I was a real addict of forum posting and have more then 2500 to 3000 posts on most of the forums. If the number of posts is high enough in your forum posting and on more number of forums then it might be useful.

Calculations:

3000 posts x 4 links in Sig = 12,000 links.
12,000 links x 10 forums = 1,20,000 links.
Each thread on an average viewed by 200 times.
1,20,000 x 200 = 24000000 impressions for your links.

Lets assume a Click through ratio of 1 to 2 percent.

For 1% CTR it will be 2,40,000 visits.
For 2% CTR it will be 4,80,000 visits.

Please let me know your ideas on the above assumptions. It is just a speculation. But that are the figures that I have seen and have experienced so far.

Nameslot,

Those figures sound really impressive! I think that they are spot on if the posts originate from a heavily marketed forum. If the forum has vBSEO or search engine optimization friendly links, they will get that type of exposure.

Most of the forums that I have come across in the last few years have not had the kind of exposure to search engines as forums such as Nameslot or Digital Point, so I do not think that most forums will carry the calculation - only because they have not been optimized in search engine traffic.

Again, it will never hinder your efforts to have your link available in the forum signature. It will only help. The question is, depending on the forum, how much will it help?

Yes that's also true. Many forums are not managed properly and soon fall down the SERP's

Just a recent example without mentioning the name of the forum.

Our member here Jayesh made some forum postings on different forums. He did got backlinks and all from the forum signatures and the content that he posted on that forums. The forum admin thought to take the forum off the servers and close it down. :crying:

There might be his own reasons but for people who were relying on the links it was total chaos.