This may be true. But your Yahoo Backlinks can be used as a measure of site popularity - good for advertisers and such. TNX, for example, looks at both Yahoo backlinks and Google pagerank.

Both...

You may have noticed that the "Visit XYZ's Homepage" link attached to your name is not nofollow.

However, I don't blame the webmaster for trying to limit spam on the forums. If sig links are...

DZone seems to be more geared towards programmers/developers than simple web designers.

With that in mind, I love DZone and go there far more than any other social bookmarking site. The rest are...

Yup. Most link directories (and article submission sites) are just good for juicing up your pagerank and backlinks. They get few visits by people that are actually looking for information - so you...

I agree. The reason it appears to show lower numbers is because it shows actual, real visitors. Other scripts like webalizer or WP Slimstat will show any requests to your web server. If you're...