If you listened to the commentators of the last decade, you’d be forgiven for thinking that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace were the only way people could communicate online. It almost seems like before these two sites came along, all we could do was email and call each other. But this does the internet a huge disservice because long before social media came along, there was already a huge and thriving network of like-minded people communicating and collaborating in many different ways.
One of the most common interaction methods that is currently being promoted is the ‘forum’. Forums are essentially discussion forums where people can start a ‘thread’ and have other people contribute to it, or just start a big discussion on the topic at hand. Due to the wide variety of topics in the world and the large number of people with Internet access, there is an almost unlimited number of forums that you can participate in, some are more popular than others.
Forums can be extremely beneficial to our search engine campaign because they can play two roles in our search. First, they can be a great place to get links (and links help our search engine rankings), and second, through social interaction, you can find new leads and new customers.
But adding links to your forum posts is generally a big ‘no’ on many forums, just like social media, you have to be a little smart about it.
One section of the site that most forums have in common is the ‘signature’. This is a section of code that is added to every post you make, and in many cases you can add links to it. A word of warning though: some forums frown on adding signatures from the start and it pays to join the forum first and make a name for yourself before adding any. In fact, some forums enforce a rule that you must have posted a certain number of comments before they will allow you to add any kind of signature to your posts.
The thing to keep in mind is that when you participate in any type of forum, you are effectively a guest on their system and if you do something that goes against their rules or ethics, they have every right to remove you. from the server There’s also something else to watch out for: the ‘do not track’ tag.
The world of Internet forums is split fairly evenly between those who love visitors and their links and those who don’t. It’s a chicken and egg thing because those who would actively encourage you to post links on their sites will end up getting a lot of visitors and therefore a lot of links, increasing their popularity, but also getting a lot of spam.
But those who don’t like you to leave links, or just find it very difficult to do so, will lose a lot of traffic. At the end of the day, it really depends on the theme of the site and if it is monetized in any way. Some of those who don’t like you to leave links sometimes give each link an attribute that was introduced only a few years ago, ‘nofollow’.
This attribute is entered as part of a standard link and is reported by the rel=’nofollow’ tag near the ‘anchor’ tag. What this does is tell search spiders (the routines that search engines send to examine the web) that the link you are about to look at should not be ‘followed’, in effect, it should be ignored.
Now many SEO experts disagree on whether this really means that a link using ‘nofollow’ is completely useless and some will show evidence that it really does make a difference and shouldn’t be ruled out entirely, however most will be. agree that if we are going to look for links, put more effort into those that do not use this attribute.
So now we just have to figure out how to find out if it’s nofollow or not and luckily it’s easy, you’ll see the source of the page you’re looking at will reveal the game. If you are using Internet Explorer or Firefox this is easy, just click the ‘menu’ item and choose ‘view source’. You will be presented with what may seem like a lot of scary code, but all you need to do is press ‘ctrl-F’ to bring up the ‘find’ command and search for one of the links on the page. Then simply search for ‘rel=nofollow’. If you find it and you’re just looking for links, then you can move on, but if you want to stay because you’re interested in the topic, do some more research.
You see, it really doesn’t pay to be too picky about these sites because those that don’t allow links are probably higher value. They are less likely to be spammed and therefore worth more on social media in general. Also, it could be that they allow links after you’ve given back to the community a bit.
So there you have it, this link building lark isn’t as neat and easy to quantify as many would have you think, but it’s worth investigating and you could get not only some decent links to affect your rankings, but it can also make a lot of connections. valuable.
