Do forum links help PageRank and SERPS?

The Search Engine Reverse Engineering Project is conducting a test to answer two questions:

1. Do forum message body links help PageRank and SERPS?
2. Do forum signature links help PageRank and SERPS?

This post is part of that test.

This post will contain two links, one in the message body and another in the message signature.

Each of these links will contain a unique string of anchor text which will be linked to web pages with no other inbound links.

Using this testing methology, we hope to be able to provide scientifically valid answers to these two questions.

For a full description of our testing methodology, please visit the links above.

Thank you for your participation in our study!

Message Body Test Link: AISEFForumMessageBody

Test results will be posted to each participating web forum.

Note to moderators: If you feel this post is inappropriate, please delete it with my apologies.

Special note to SEOChat members: SEOChat will not be participating in the forum signature portion of this test, but will still benefit from being linked from the test pages and from the introduction to new users which will result from participation in this test.

Yes they both help in the serps and to increase PR.

If this was a genuine test I would be very interested in the results, but I still don't understand why the link takes you to a page that is full of all kind of amazon and affiliate banners

??:

If the forum gets spidered (not all do - as of the ? blah blah and the session ID), but if they are, those links will count as a backlink to your site, thats why everyone adds links in their signature on forums. You would be surprised how many webmasters signup for hundreds of forums and do this to get links back (good idea, it dont require a link back unlike many sites these days!)


Dan

I am not sure if vbulletin fully recognises the googlebot yet? I remember it would of never helped before, but if they have improved upon their system as they said they would, and made googlebot see pages without sessionid's I am sure it would. This forum, which used htaccess to produce non-dynamic pages would surely help though.

Yep, htaccess rewrite rules help a lot. Thats why i love apache! hehe

Im not sure what you mean by non-dynamic pages, as they are still dynamic, but yeah getting rid of the ? and vars help a lot.

Dan

As mention in this thread according to Google's latest news, forum and guestbook links give less effect on position in Google results.....

http://forums.seochat.com/t11609/s.html

They helped my sites as backlinks

Hello,

it is always nice to retest things, but I am sure every one here can agree with the following:

Signature links on an active forum, like SEOChat can atmost raise your PR to 3 or possibly 4 if you are a very, very active poster.

The links show up as backlinks, but have little or none effect on the SERPS.

Forum links get your website crawled more often, and this is the only real benefit of a forum link.

i've seen forum members with hundreds of BL's from here, but they don't seem to have near the effect than if they were coming from multiple individual websites instead. is there a forum cap for pr passed, considering the fact that all the links are coming from the same site forums seochat com?