With all of the changes with Google’s various algorithms there’s been some great questions being posted within the Google Webmaster forums and as of late a discussion has risen around whether or not placing a link to your website within a forum profile/signature of yours would cause any negative SEO effects. For those of us who have been around forums for a while – you’ll know that links are part of the forum culture. Sharing interesting articles, linking to relevant news publications, etc. It’s alot of what we do on forums. So what does Google say about this? John Mueller came in and shared the following:
Just to be absolutely clear, if you are dropping links to your site in other people’s forums in the hope of gaming search engines, then that’s considered web-spam and can be taking into account by both our algorithms and our manual web-spam teams. It doesn’t matter how much “PR” the other site has, it doesn’t matter if it’s a .gov forum — what you’re doing would be considered web-spam by us.
If you care about how search engines like Google view your site, I’d recommend cleaning those link-drops up, removing the link to your site, and not doing that in the future.
Now unfortunately John wasn’t very clear about which links exactly he was talking about. So just to be clear John, you weren’t very clear about whether or not you were referencing profile links, signature links, or post links. Now generally I would agree that dropping links within your various forum profiles and signatures is probably something to avoid at all costs – however there also stand plenty of situations where placing that link is actually a good thing. In-fact the very same Google Webmaster forums thread that started this whole discussion features a perfect example of posting a non-spammy link within a forum:
I’ve ran my fair share of forums over the years and I have to say that I trust the links posted within forums more than anywhere else. See forums are moderated by both staff and the community. Nobody likes spam, and as such spam links and spam posts are quickly removed and you’re left with curated content. It’s alot like we’re doing some of the work on behalf of Google really.
So what do you think? Is Google taking the right approach here? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
I think forum links are very valuable and should be considered a legitimate backlink. It’s too bad that a few bad apples who spam can spoil the bunch. As you suggested, I think we should let forum moderators determine what is and is not considered spam.