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Are forum signature links considered blackhat now?



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Are forum signature links considered blackhat now?

Google is making just about every type of backlink "blackhat" now. If it isn't built naturally (IE: someone you do not know randomly links to you) and you had a hand in making it, it is blackhat. Forum signature links are definitely not natural as you add the link yourself and usually use some kind of targeted keyword or phrase in your link. Does Google now consider these unethical and blackhat?

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Beverly
Google made a huge deal about 'forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature' as being unnatural or link-spam.

For instance:
Thanks, that’s great info!
- Paul
paul’s pizza san diego pizza best pizza san diego

source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

On one hand, Google makes it out like all non-editorial backlinks are bad.

And, yet Matt Cutts admits to leaving a link back to his own site via blog comments.

I leave topically relevant comments on topically relevant sites all the time. So somebody posts an SEO conspiracy theory and I’m like, “No, that’s not right,” I’ll show up and a leave a comment that says, “Here is the pointer that shows this is not correct,” or, “Here’s the official word,” or something like that. And I’ll just leave a comment with my name, and often even point to my blog rather than Google’s webmaster blog, because I’m just representing myself. So lots of people do that all the time and it is completely fine.
The sorts of things that I would start to worry about is it’s better to often leave your name so someone knows who they are dealing with, rather than “cheap study tutorials” or “fake driver’s license”, or whatever the name of your business is, often that will get a chillier reception than if you show up with your name.




We're getting some mixed signals here and I think this could possibly apply to forum signature lines too.

So maybe the take away from all this is that it's ok to have a signature link on blog comments or forum posts, just be sure not to keyword spam.

Another option would be to disable the signature line on posts (some forum software allows this) and only have a few links from each forum you post at.



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Corzhens
That so called black hat is giving me a headache with my SEO studies because I get confused. I have learned to build backlinks and one method is by posting on a big forum. Now here comes the issue that a signature link on a forum may be considered black hat. What if I am an old time member of the forum that I have a lot of posts and comments so my signature will be all over the boards. Is that considered black hat?



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