Discussion: Signature with site link hurts SEO?

[hondablaster]

So I thought I would add my blog to my sig as an SEO experiment, after doing so I noticed after the first index on technibble being indexed that my rank dropped after 3 more Technibble pages indexed with my sig were indexed I was delisted for the keyword.

As I understand, forum links count against you, but I didn't think it would be this bad since my link is very natural and the forum is not spammy.

Take a look at some screen shots and keep in mind this could be unrelated to anything I done on technibble.

This is more of a discussion where I can learn instead of asking for advice.

Thanks

[tminer]

Not sure because I actually rank pretty well for the keywords in my sig on technibble.

[hondablaster]

Before there is a deep flood of people stating the obvious unintentionally. This may be caused by other factors outside to Technibble.com sigs.

I also been monitoring SERPs of a few other sites periodically and Google is really a mind of its own. One day someone will be delisted and the next be back at #1 then drop to #200 then be at #4. The will be in the mid 30s for about 3 days. Its crazy.

EDIT @ 7:22PM PST this post is already google indexed. In 4 hours I will post a new result this should be interesting.

[npinc]

I'm interested to find out what you learn.

[16k_zx81]

mate its about link quality and diversity.

Forget your forum sig. Get a bulk quantity of diverse, high PR links with relevant anchor text.

Drop in the ocean.

[hondablaster]

@16k_zx81

I agree, this is more of a toy experiment. I bought the domain and site for cheap so its worth it to bang around on google.

Thanks for looking out.

@everyone else.

I had to remove the sig link early. My rank dropped and held steady for my keywords, then my production eCommerce site started dropping the anchor text and keywords that are linked between the two. It was in a way "infecting" those specific keywords ranking on a different domain . Literally the results went from 17 to 129 and I was done with "testing". WOW!

This was very interesting. If my SERP picks up on my experimental blog I will keep everyone posted. I now have 17 indexed Technibble pages that show my sig. In a few days it should return to 0 and we can see!

[Tucson Techie]

Just so I understand this correctly, if you embed your website URL into your Technibble signature, this actually counts against you with Google? And the same goes for backlinking from any forum?

[Tucson Techie]

An interesting article on this topic:

http://webdesignlists.com/getting-fo...ogle-way.html/

This is a good topic for discussion and I'm interested in what others have to say. According to the article above, the conclusion seems to be that relevant forum backlinks can be a good thing so long as they're not spammy or you're not link bombing forums.

Still, I wonder if I should remove my signature backinks. Hmm, Google is a scarey place nowadays, hard to predict.

[hondablaster]

The results are in.

Because the site has had a few ups and downs I needed to age the domain for a while.

The conclusion is that a sig can help a tiny bit. When I finally removed the sig link it went from a pagerank of 1 to 0 after that also the site started to dip as the links become de-indexed with time.

After adding the sig link back in within a few days site quickly stabilized at a rank of six for the specified keyword.



My final thoughts would be it helps an aged domain with stability in SERPs but not anything competitive.