2 replies to this topic

[RalphSlatton]

I've been trying to understand all this backlink stuff and decided to try some ideas out this weekend. I'd like to promote a review that was written about me and want it to appear higher up in my search results. Most of the advice I found was to backlink with blogs and forums. I'm suddenly discovering how difficult this is. I feel a little like a salesman with a bad suit and cheap cologne. It seems that a majority of places just don't like people wanting links. Many of the sites are "nofollow." I certainly understand, because if I had a nice piece of property, I wouldn't want people sticking their company signs on it. However, we beginners have to start somewhere, which brings me to my question. When I fill out my profile with sites and they have a place to add my url, will the search engines crawl my profile or does the link need to be somewhere in my post? Let's assume these are not "no follow" user profiles.

[qwerty]

That's going to vary from one site to the next. I'm sure you can understand that owners of blogs and forums only want user-generated content from users who actually have something to say rather than people who are just looking for a place to stick a link.

In the case of this forum, signature links are invisible to search engines.

[Michael Martinez]

I have noticed complaints in the Web spammer community that specializes in placing these kinds of links that they either don't last long or stop passing value quickly -- AND that many sites are actively working against them.

As a rule of thumb, I would say it is better to assume that profile links don't help and may hurt than to hope that they will provide any substantial SEO benefit.