Signatures

Just got your email about sigs Darrin where you mention it has proven a problem with Google. What exactly do you mean by this? Have they contacted you about or did you specifically ask them ?

Please dont think I doubt you, or am critical of your decision. Its just that as you know I also have a SEO forum (German langauge) and so I'm interested as to how Google sees signatures. I'm considering blocking them too and would be keen to know if Google has specifically contacted you about them or you have asked them yourself and wish to find out what specifically the problem is.


Cheers
Alan

There were signs of PR0 on the forum - and I think that the mass linking to other sites has caused some pretty big problems. There is not other reason for which a ban would have occured as I don't voluntarily link to bad sites - and I certainly don't spam!

Darrin,

I certainly respect your wishes and any decision you wish to make with respect to signatures. I really do

However, I'm just woundering if your issue may be dance related?

My own forums where sigs are enabled still have a PR6 which drops as you drill down and my "html forums archive" has over 13k urls in www2 etc and this archive has PR3 or PR4?

Have any of your rankings changed as a result of your sig issue or is it just the PR issue?

In closing, I want to say again, it's your sandbox, sigs are no big deal for me, and if you want to turn them off then thats fine.

My sympathies, Darrin. This is a low blow - and I know that I was part of the debate about allowing signatures on the forum. I still think that you shouldn't have sigs for some, but not for all -- but I definitely regret the impact it has had on SEO Chat.

This begs the question: at what point do sigs on a forum become problematic? I mean, for a long time you had a certain number of sigs, and that was ok, the PR even went up -- although SEO Chat is growing rapidly, with 700 plus members now. Is that part of this - I mean, have you in some way become a victim of your own success?

Do you think there's a ratio involved, between the number of pages on the forum, and the number of sigs showing up?

Having incurred this penalty, do sites that link to you also risk incurring penalty? I ask this for selfish reasons, because I recommend SEO Chat on my new web hosting facts site, and have an outgoing link pointing here on every page. Won't do you any good if I in turn get penalised, will it?

Also, I'm part of a very active web hosting community that is my favourite internet haunt, and they allow sigs. Not everyone uses them, but the membership is also growing rapidly, and judging by what happened here, at some point this could get dangerous. Should I advise them to turn off the sigs?

Again, my sympathies, and apologies for the pressure you had to allow across-the-board sigs. How long do you think before SEO chat recovers?

KaKoa

Respecfully, I see no reason to jump to conclusion and or take any action on your site untill we have more evidence to suggest/validate what our gracious host has said.

Meaning: a direct correlation between links in sigs and a graybar PR.

Please see my post in this thread. I'm not convinced.

Hi, Steve,

As you say, it would be hasty to jump to conclusions; however, this is a severe penalty for SEO Chat, and has worrying implications.

If it's not the sig issue, then what could it be? I know you mentioned it might be "dance related" but I'm a bit foggy on this theory.

If it is the sig issue, and Google has the perception of SEO Chat as a link farm (erroneously, but that's another story) -- then is that not cause for concern to sites that link to it? I mean, you're warned all the time not to associate with link farms -- and having lost a site through the Webseed network disaster over a year ago, I'm very leary of having anything like this happen to me again.

I'm NOT saying that SEO Chat is a link farm. But it looks like Google might think so -- and Google does provide about 80% of the traffic to my sites. When Google decided that Webseed was a link farm, hundreds of excellent content-based sites connected to it had their PR take a massive nosedive, traffic bottomed out, and eventually Webseed went under -- it's enough to make me cautious, that's for sure.

I think this other thread may help all of us understand the series of events. See:

http://www.seochat.com/viewtopic.php?t=1133

I understand your concerns and would not want to infer otherwise

By dance related I meant that during the dance (currently), sometimes PR can go up and down like a yo yo or it may have just been a technical glitch which will hopefully be corrected.

Good luck