White Hat Link Wheels? - How to Make Backlinks from Forums Count

If you go to more or less any busy-ish SEO forums or resources on the internet, you won't have to observe very long before you will see this question:

"Do forum signatures work?"

By "work" the question is usually referring to whether or not forum signatures will help with a website's rankings, and in most cases the answer is: by themselves, no, they won't make much difference.

In general (and there are exceptions) a link is generally worth roughly the amount of effort required by you to get it.

For example if anyone can just sign up to a site and get a link easily, that is not likely to be a trusted or powerful site, because if it's so easy spammers will plague it, and it's not likely to become a powerful or trusted site with spam all over it.

Hence signing up for a forum, inserting your signatures and blasting away with posts is not very likely to help your rankings much, that would be too easy and everyone would be doing it.

And, well actually lots do, but they are generally wasting their time.

However, this is a way of using forums to get decent links, but as with everything in SEO it will require a long-term view, and some work and effort over a period of time to reap the full benefit available to you.

It's a simple but very under-used technique - adding value to the forum in question.

Ok so here's a bullet point list which will be explained in further detail below.

1. Research, find & join at least 5 forums that dont use nofollow on outbound links and that are relevant to your niche - this is key.
   
2. Participate in each for several weeks, take part in discussions but drop no links to anything that isn't public domain, Youtube, media etc.
   
3. Fill out your profile to get the free link from there, but don't set up signature links yet, if at all, remember they don't work much if at all anyway.
   
4. Observe common forum beginner questions, and not-so-common questions too. Note them down.
   
5. Write different and unique offsite content (ie not on the forums) in at least 3 (5 or 6 is good) different places, Hub Pages, Squidoo etc, that addresses these questions, and linking to your main site once with your target anchor text.
   
6. Whenever anyone next asks the question answer them on the forum and provide a link for more info to your offsite content.
7. Use the default URL as the link, not favourable anchor text.
   
8. Nine times out of ten the link will get to stay, and you now have an utterly relevant Google link from the body text of the forum, which is thought to be worth much more than signatures, to your content.
   
9. Submit each main thread's RSS feed to two different feed aggregators, and for all the hubs or articles too.
   
10. The next time you see the question in that forum, answer it by linking to your previous thread using the target anchor text
11. Rinse and repeat across multiple forums and questions..

Got it? :)

Ok lets look in a bit more detail at what we're doing.

Look at the image to your right.

• Visualize your main site as the central circle - No 39.
• Your offsite hubs are the three x No 12s.
• The small circles (No 3s) are your first forum threads linking to the hubs
• The very outer circles are the next forum thread questions, linking to your first thread that has the link to your Hub in it.
  

Starting to get it now?

This is actually also how the Pagerank algorithm works, but this system is more like a Link Wheel than a PR gathering technique, perhaps a better name would be a "Relevance Wheel" and it really just further builds on the internal HubPages linkwheel concept

It's kind of like a "White hat linkwheel" because the system is built on real user interaction, quality content, and crucially editorial trust, for links. This is all that Google ask for, that if a site links to another site, that it should be because the links are trusted and useful, and for no other reason.

So in effect, over time you construct a network of highly related useful content, all linking to the next level up the chain, with nodes getting stronger as you move up the chain and finally arriving at your site.

You are daisy-chaining relevance and anchor text up through each stage, until finally it all arrives at your main site. Remember, the forums themselves will carry some authority around your keywords. We are then drilling down even more, by answering specific questions on exact topics, with an uber-relevant link to an external resource.

At every node up the chain we have more relevant links arriving from other sites, and more RSS presence from the feeds you submitted, until it all arrives at your site as a virtual tsunami of link relevance.

In small niches this can be devastatingly effective, and the best part is that it is entirely adding value to each forum or Hub site you are using, they get relevant content and good information, (plus inbound links) and by actually contributing something, you get something better back in return.

Steps 1-3 Building Forum Trust

It's incredibly easy to spot new forum members who are only there for Signature links, dont be one of them.

They turn up and start blasting away "yes me too" or "thanks for sharing" type glib one-liners to boost their post-count to the point they are allowed sig links. Often they don't even get that far before they start trying to link to their main site from threads.Those ones don't usually get much further.

On the vast majority of forums, this won't just wash at all. So break the mold, be different, contribute, converse, get involved in discussions, and don't link to anything outside of the forum except perhaps videos or news items.

After a few weeks when you haven't even put Sig links on the forum admins or moderators will likely have some trust for you, have possibly decided that you're OK and not there primarily for links.

This is what you need to achieve.

Steps 4-5 Content is Still King

Your content has to be worthy of the link to it, if its not, or looks too blatantly self-promotional, your forum link might not be tolerated. Keep the hub content factual, and the sales and marketing out of it, it must stand on it's own as an article or resource.

Steps 6-7 - It's all in the delivery

The ease of execution of putting the links in and getting to keep them will depend on two things now, your trust levels in the forum, and the quality of the content you link to. If you are natural and helpful in your answer and the content is good, you should be fine in most forums. Not using anchor text and just the URL usually helps.

Step 8 - Body Text Links Baby

Many top SEOs believe that Google weights links differently depending on their placement on the page, and this is a reasonable assumption, links smack bang in the middle of written content are likely to be much more important with regards to document relevance, than footer links for example.

So its also reasonable to assume that as with footers and blog comments links, that forum signatures are not weighted very highly. And even if they did carry the same weight as a body text link, there is good evidence that Google only count the first link to any page, so that repeating it 25 times per page in the forum conversation will likely only give the value of one link anyway.

And usually a forum Signature is nearly always aimed at the homepage which is probably not absolutely relevant to the forum thread / post.

However body text links in a thread, to a related piece of information fit absolutely with Google's view of how inter site linking should be done, and so have the best chance of being weighted the most highly.

So make them count, and remember, by default the URL will probably be the same as the content's pagetitles, so the full URL will have the keywords in it anyway eg:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Allin-Scooter-Hire-Ibiza-How-to-Use-Google-Advanced-Search-Operators

Step 9 RSS Feed Submission

RSS feeds get picked up and spread around the entire internet, there are thousands of sites out there picking up feeds and reproducing them with links back to the target site, and even if you're not so "lucky" as to have this happen to your feeds, this is only reinforcing each node, it's main linkjuice and relevance feeds in and out again via decent links.

Step 10 -Thread Reinforcement

These are the internal link reinforcement to your "answer threads" to ensure that page stays in the main Google index as long as possible, the more internal links to it from fresh threads the better.

Ok, so that was quite long, and as you can see there a reasonable amount of work and effort required on your part to make it work, however that is why it works, because it's built on trust (editorially awarded links) and high quality content.

There's an old saying that "nothing good comes easy.." and it's mostly true, but put in the effort and you will reap the rewards, in both SEO and life.

The last part to this that hasn't even been mentioned thus far is that each node will also funnel a small stream of highly targeted traffic upstream, and some of whom will reach your site as the upline expert on their subject.

And is it not then logical that being as Google is utterly focused on relevant user experience, that they too will likely view your site in the same way?

Good luck in all your endeavors.