Poll: Do Signature, Blogger Comments, and Guestbooks Help?

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to see what everyone thought about putting up links in signatures, guest books, and blogger comments (not the actual blog) as far as SEO goes.

Should we do it, or is it a waste of time?

Thanks.

A famous spammer once told me - "50,000 bloggers can't all be wrong."

One of the search technology employees for one of the big 4 SEs also once said - "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight."

Do they help? They can.

Would I use them? No, I would not.

i do know that MSN spiders almost all of the forums, and the signature links do carry weight. some of my sites have been found entirely by forum sigs....

I must admit I dropped a link at the occasional guestbook. All related guestbooks of course, most put up by friendly competitor/collegue webmasters. Those links will show up and my guess is that the close relation compensates for the nigh-insignificance of the guestbook link

What's more: I get some traffic from that. Got some today. I guess it helps that I only post at clean guestbooks, and not at abandoned/spammy/cr@pbooks. And they don't make up 80% of my links either.

Don't rely solely on this stuff ever. But it can be a bonus and worth the time if you spend under 2 minutes

Bottom line is that it works. Type Miserable Failure in google. How do you think they got that to work. Doesn't have to be related at all.

True - you can get anywhere with sheer link power. Alas I don't have the time nor the money for that...

The better you play it, the better the effect, I'm sure.

Then again. In google's eyes every SEOed site in the world might be related to "miserable failure" in a way Kidding of course.

Yes, as long as the links are spiderable, they work. Webmasters are wising up to SEOs who spam those scripts with automated programs, so more and more forum, guestbook and blog owners are taking steps to make the links worthless for SEO.

It's not a cost effective strategy for a manual effort. It is a rude strategy for an automated effort.

I think they count and i use it.

If you look at your site as a living plant you need roots to feed it with traffic as a plant needs roots to feed it with water.
A plant has thick roots (high pr solid links)
A plant also has little roots (comment spam and forums sigs)

All these roots help the plant grow big and strong.

A link is a link is a link, that's for sure. Now, the quality of these links can differ. Can't say anything about signatures though probably they do work pretty well when set up correctly, but once a link to a site I was optimizing was put (not even by me but just by somebody who found it and wrote an entry about it) on a forum with a topic exactly the same as that site - as a result, about 1/3 of the traffic to my site was coming from just that one little link. Did it give my site much PR? - I don't think so, but the traffic was there. Wouldn't call it SEO though but rather online marketing.

Blogger comments - since blogs are spidered heavily any link found in a blog is even better in theory, but again I would say it's all in the content relevance.

I would never do it automatically though, when something in SEO is overdone it can lead to an opposite effect. A few links here and there can be easily added manually, and are safer. Besides think of this undesirable side effect: if you run some software that just finds any forum/blog/guestbook out there and posts something automatically it is sure to be sheer spam, hence you will only be able to do it once or twice before getting banned/deleted.

Just came across a forum where urls are displayed using not the normal <a> tags but [url] tags... Wonder if those get spidered as links as well as regular ones?