Member Avatar for BlackhatSEO

If I were to set up a signature in a forum completely unrelated to my website will it actually benefit me? I have an odds comparison website and am struggling to find suitable forums to get appropriate backlinks from.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by AirForceOne

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Signatures on unrelated forums are rarely a sustainable SEO strategy. raised a common question and the thread shows the split view: points to occasional referral traffic and visibility, while , and flag devaluation and ethical/spam concerns; highlights anchor-text effects. The practical takeaway is that signatures can produce direct clicks and tiny brand exposure when the forum audience genuinely matches the site, but they are not a dependable source of ranking signals.

Search engines treat pattern-based link schemes skeptically, and many forums add attributes that prevent signature links from passing ranking credit. See Google's link schemes for the official stance. That makes mass signature campaigns low-value and potentially risky from a policy perspective.

For an odds-comparison site, invest in assets and outreach that attract relevant, editorial links: data visualizations, an odds calculator, unique historical-odds datasets, API access, guest posts on sports/betting blogs, and targeted outreach to resource pages or journalists. When forum posting is appropriate, keep it honest: follow forum rules, add value to threads, use brand-oriented anchors instead of repeated exact-match keywords, and track referral performance with analytics and UTM tags.

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Member Avatar for Flower

Most of time we find that the signatures are not relevant to the forums as created by the forum member but still it give traffic and increase the visibility of site in search engine results.

Member Avatar for canadafred

If I were to set up a signature in a forum completely unrelated to my website will it actually benefit me? I have an odds comparison website and am struggling to find suitable forums to get appropriate backlinks from.

Despite the fad, signature links are of little value even when amassed by the thousands. A few count significantly but after that they get saturated like any other repetitious link.

Member Avatar for MktgRob

It strikes me as somewhat dishonest and deceptive if you were to create a signature on a forum unrelated to your website in the hopes of getting more traffic to your site? Is this what you are saying or am I misunderstanding this?

Member Avatar for Allison2009

Even if Google takes them as links in the 1st crawl, it would immediately remove it in the next crawl.

There are perceptions among the webmasters that even the signature in the relevant forums are not seriously taken by Google, why do you want to make signature links in the irrelevant forums. Why do you want to waste your time on this.

Member Avatar for AirForceOne

I think the backlinks in your signature would benefits the linked sites in the anchor text. :)

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