Value of Forum Signatures in Google

Most of the people think that forums are useless and building links from them does not affect rankings. Forums signature can be useful only if they are from PR page, I have noticed Google or any other search engine gives very less value to signatures. Have you ever tried to check your back links? You will notice that none of forum signature will be showed up in results. However, forum signatures do counted as back links but only useful when thread gets older and it gets some PR. I have seen that if you place your link in post not in signature, search engines will count as good back link. Sometimes No Follow links are showed in Google results as a back link when I placed the link in posts. Recently I was assigned to do 1000 forum posting on high PR forums. I have learned many things from that project; we can target the keywords through forum signatures. My client was asking to place the link on those pages which have gone through Google last PR update and it worked out pretty well. When I made posts on those pages they already have some PR3 to 4, some of the pages have low PR but it is also useful. When I completed the 500 forums postings with signature links I have seen the keyword I was targeting comes up in Google search on first page after 1 month.

There is one thing you should keep in mind never use same anchor text on too many forums, like if you have used the anchor text in 200 forums then change it for other forums because it might look like auto postings or submissions. Forums signatures are good for traffic as well; if you have something useful in your anchor text people will visit your website. Forums signatures are counted as only 1 back link, if you have made 500 posts in forum and you are a regular member, it does not mean you have 500 back links only 1 link will be counted as back link. Usually forums are good for traffic rather than back links, there is also one more thing only do follow forums will give you benefit of back link. If you have joined no follow forums then there is no value of signatures other than traffic you get from your signatures.