What does google do with links in sigs like here?

**cowsgonemadd3** · 07-10-2005, 03:40 PM

I have my link in my sig here and on many other sites yet I dont see why my page rank is only 1 or 2. What does google do with those links in my sigs? Is it not like a normal link or does it count it as something different? Google says it only counts 25 links in all my posts as pr helping links? And it only counts 25 total when yahoo counts all my links in my sigs.
Thanks

**monkey** · 07-10-2005, 04:29 PM

it only counts some of your backlinks first of all. so you would realistically have more backlinks, but ones that don't show in googles search. google isn't the only search engine so who cares if google sees only 25 and MSN and Yahoo have you for 4 times as many (just an example). The trick is to always be getting backlinks, and not say to yourself once I hit a certain number you quit. You've got to keep in mind google, yahoo, etc. don't have every page on ever site indexed. So truthfully to assume itd pick up all the backlinks is ridiculous.

My answer to your question is google does what it wants to with the link. It may add it as a backlink it may not. Keep working.

**chrishirst** · 07-10-2005, 05:57 PM

Forum sig links seem to have been treated differently since February, and don't seem to be getting the same value as general links.

One of my playing sites had no backlinks other than forum sig links from another forum I participate on and lost a few places during the February update. Getting some decent directory links has started to pull it back up again though.

**cowsgonemadd3** · 07-10-2005, 08:27 PM

I guess sig links can not hurt my rankings but I thought that it would help a lot more than they have too. Yahoo seems to have found them because they say I have over 15000 links....
I guess that main post and main page links matter more than sig links. I know one thing I bet there helping me with and thats getting google to index or to come back to my page often. Lately my site has been being indexed like ever 3 days or so. It used to be once a month. I also added to like 50 directories and got a few pr6 sites to link to mine.

**chrishirst** · 07-11-2005, 05:43 AM

Nope. Think about it carefully, Forums are highly dynamic and pages get deeper and deeper into the forum structure and end up with less LP and PR to pass on. So ANY links in threads (the SEs can't tell the difference between post and signature) will carry the same [diminishing] value.
Forum signature links are more valuable for real visitors who may find the posters comments/apparent knowledge useful and may lead to a enquiry.

The surge in crawling activity does happen as new links are identified from established sites. some rudimentary observations on the logs of sites I look after/own does show a correlation between external links and crawl frequency.