Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
disavow link more than 100,000 lines
I recieved a huge amount of spamy link (most of them has spam score 100) Currently my disavow link is arround 85.000 lines but at least i have 100.000 more domain which i should add them. All of them are domains and i don't have any backlink in my file. My Problem is that google dosen't accept disavow link which are more than 2MB and showes this message : File too big: Maximum file size is 100,000 lines and 2MB What should i do now?
Technical SEO | Nov 3, 2021, 5:04 AM | sforoughi0 -
Backlink quality vs quantity: Should I keep spammy backlinks?
Regarding backlinks, I'm wondering which is more advantageous for domain authority and Google reputation: Option 1: More backlinks including a lot of spammy links Option 2: Fewer backlinks but only reliable, non-spam links I've researched this topic around the web a bit and understand that the answer is somewhere in the middle, but given my site's specific backlink volume, the answer might lean one way or the other. For context, my site has a spam score of 2%, and when I did a quick backlink audit, roughly 20% are ones I want to disavow. However, I don't want to eliminate so many backlinks that my DA goes down. As always, we are working to build quality backlinks, but I'm interested in whether eliminating 20% of backlinks will hurt my DA. Thank you!
Technical SEO | Oct 6, 2021, 6:45 AM | LianaLewis1 -
Sitemap use for very large forum-based community site
I work on a very large site with two main types of content, static landing pages for products, and a forum & blogs (user created) under each product. Site has maybe 500k - 1 million pages. We do not have a sitemap at this time.
Technical SEO | Apr 29, 2020, 3:35 PM | CommManager
Currently our SEO discoverability in general is good, Google is indexing new forum threads within 1-5 days roughly. Some of the "static" landing pages for our smaller, less visited products however do not have great SEO.
Question is, could our SEO be improved by creating a sitemap, and if so, how could it be implemented? I see a few ways to go about it: Sitemap includes "static" product category landing pages only - i.e., the product home pages, the forum landing pages, and blog list pages. This would probably end up being 100-200 URLs. Sitemap contains the above but is also dynamically updated with new threads & blog posts. Option 2 seems like it would mean the sitemap is unmanageably long (hundreds of thousands of forum URLs). Would a crawler even parse something that size? Or with Option 1, could it cause our organically ranked pages to change ranking due to Google re-prioritizing the pages within the sitemap?
Not a lot of information out there on this topic, appreciate any input. Thanks in advance.0 -
If I get spammy backlinks removed is it still necessary to disavow?
Now there is some conflicting beliefs here and I want to know what you think. If I got a high spam website to remove my backlink, is a disavow through search console still necessary ? Keep in mind if it helps even in the slightest to improve rankings im for it!
Technical SEO | Aug 23, 2019, 5:24 PM | Colemckeon1 -
My backlinks are not showing in webmaster tools? Why
Hi Experts, I have follow backlinks from a domain for 6 months, but its not apear in Links to Your Site tools (search console) that domain has 302k indexed pages in google! Could you please explain me why google not showing this type of backlinks?
Technical SEO | Jul 30, 2024, 11:11 AM | denakalami7 -
Subdomain as News Section instead of Source in Google News?
Hi, trying to dig into Google News for a large site, mostly containing news.
Technical SEO | Mar 1, 2016, 2:27 PM | m.m
The structure of the site network is subdomain.domain.se, and each subdomain has it's own brand with it's own news: x.domain.se
y.domain.se
z.domain.se
etc... Each brand/subdomain is more or less to equate with its own subjectfield/section. In Google News every subdomain is configured with it's own Site Source url, but also having the set up with one section with the same url. It seems like they're getting conflicts in Google News, Google can't always figure out which news article to which brand. Example: an article owned by brand A, but it is sometimes happens that articles getting labeled as brand B in the news SERP, though the link takes you correctly to brand A. I am thinking that this config in News Publisher Center may be a problem? Anyone having any thoughts if that would be better if we delete all source urls except for domain.se-brand and then put all the other subdomains as sections? www.domain.se x.domain.se y.doamin.se z.domain.se Any smart thoughts on this one? Or anything else that could make this wrong labeling (all content included images are hosted in same domain for example). Regards,
Magnus0 -
Optimal Structure for Forum Thread URL
For getting forum threads ranked, which is best and why? site.com**/topic/**thread-title-goes-here site.com**/t/**thread-title-goes-here site.com**/**thread-title-goes-here I'd take comfort in knowing that SEOmoz uses the middle version, except that "q" is more meaningful to a human than "t". The last option seems like the best bet overall, except that users could potentially steal urls that I may want to use in the future. My old structure was site.com/forum/topic/TOPIC_ID-thread-title-goes-here so obviously any of those would be a vast improvement, but I might as well make the best choice now so I only have to change once.
Technical SEO | Jun 21, 2012, 2:15 PM | PatrickGriffith0 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | May 17, 2011, 6:51 PM | fabiank0