I just notice that A.N.Other Forum puts nofollow on links in user signatures. I though that was pretty shady LOL. Share some link love for the people creating the content for your site!

And this should be of interest to us here because????

peanutpad: if the other forum (I suspect its initials rhyme with teepee) has nofollow links on signatures, it's because they need to be there due to the nature of the people posting.

In other words, you only need to protect yourself with nofollow if there's something you're linking out to that's shady...it's not the practice that's wrong, it's the posters.

It sounds like a measure to keep out useless content. You know, make it a less attractive target for spammers.

Signature links probably don't carry much weight in any search engine, anyway. I come here, and to a few otrher forums, to get and occasionally share good advice. The links in my signature mean every now and then if I write something impressive, someone might actually click one of those links. And that happens whether they're marked nofollow or not.

The suggested use for nofollow links is anything where the users create the link themselves; where you can't personally vouch for them. So it's not really that inappropriate.