Member Avatar for n2ads

I was wondering....everyone mentions that we should get other popular sites to link our website, which will help in promotion and PR rankings. What if that popular site had a forum and I posted in the forum a message and referred to my www website. My link would now be on that popular ones site when it is indexed, but not on a links page. Does that hold as much as being on a links page or do crawlers know a forum page from a links page?

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Dani AI

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The question raised by — whether a URL placed inside another site's forum counts like a "real" backlink — comes down to three practical signals: crawlability, link treatment, and contextual/authority signals on the page. and touched on anchor text and placement; the modern view expands that to how the forum page is configured and how search engines are instructed to treat the link.

To evaluate a forum thread without guessing, look at these factors: whether the specific thread URL is indexed (try a site search or cached view), whether the link is visible in the raw HTML or injected by JavaScript, whether the anchor carries a rel attribute like nofollow/ugc/sponsored, whether the page is behind a login, and the page/domain’s topical relevance and outbound-link density. Example quick checks:

site:forum.example.com "yourdomain.com"
cache:forum.example.com/path/to/thread

If a forum marks user links with rel="nofollow" or similar, the link’s ranking influence is reduced (Google has described treating those attributes as hints rather than hard rules). Context still matters: a link embedded within a useful, on-topic post on a well-indexed, authoritative page will be more valuable than one hidden in a footer, buried behind logins, or duplicated across many low-quality pages.

Practical takeaways: prefer contributions that add genuine value and place links inside substantive posts rather than repeated boilerplate signatures; diversify where links come from; avoid mass identical postings that resemble spam. Use Search Console or a backlink tool to confirm that the forum pages were crawled and that the links showed up. Forum links can help, but they are most effective as part of a broader, quality-first linking strategy rather than a sole tactic.

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Member Avatar for jewboy

You should always use your anchor texted link in forum posts (if possible). The effect is weak, but better than nothing at all. IMHO a link on a links page is better, just as long as there aren't too many outbounds on that page (over 30).

Member Avatar for Dani

What you are suggesting is a well known technique - to post to other forums with your forum URL and anchor text in your signature. If you post to lots of different forums, it's a great way to get free backlinks on a wide variety of domains. It works even better when the forums use mod_rewrite to have the appearance of static URLs (such as DaniWeb does) so the pages with your link get indexed well. It's one of the best ways of link building with the primary downside just being the time it takes to find lots of various forums and to register and post to each one of them.

As far as links on a link page, as Promediacorp has suggested, those are actually one of the worst types of links to get because it's very easy for Google to tell what is a links page (even if there are just a set few links on it). Google is even known to give less weight to links that are on pages that contain the word "links" in the URL such as a links.html page!

Links built into page content, however, such as forum signatures do, are the best way :) Anytime you can get a link built into page content, go for it!

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