SEO Training Series – Traditional Forums May Be a Better Way to Get Those Links and Also Link Up

If you were to listen to commentators from the last decade then you would be forgiven for thinking that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace were the only way people could communicate online. It almost seems that before these two sites appeared all we could do was send emails and phone each other. But this does the Internet a great disservice because way before social networking appeared there was already a huge, thriving network of like-minded people communicating and collaborating in many different ways.

One of the most common methods of interaction and one that is thriving today is the ‘forum’. Forums are essentially discussion boards where people can start a ‘thread’ and other people contribute to it, or just start a big argument about the subject at hand. Because of the massive variety of subjects in the world and the huge number of people with access to the Internet, there is an almost unlimited number of forums that you can be a part of, some being more popular than others.

Forums can be extremely beneficial to our search engine campaign because they can perform two roles in our quest. Firstly, they can be a great place to get links from (and links help our search engine ranking) and secondly, through social interaction you can potentially find new leads and new customers.

But adding links to your forum messages is generally a big ‘no’ in many forums, so much like social networking, you need to be a little bit clever about it.

One section of the site that most forums have in common is the ‘signature’. This is a section of code that gets 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 early on and it’s worth taking part in the forum first and getting a bit of a name for yourself before adding any. In fact, some forums enforce a rule whereby you have to have posted a certain number of comments before they will allow you to add any kind of signature to your posts.

What you need to bear in mind is that when you are taking part in any kind of forum, you are effectively a guest on their system and if you do anything that goes against their rules or ethics, they are quite within their rights to remove you from the server. There’s also something else to watch out for – the ‘no-follow’ tag.

The Internet world of forums is split pretty much 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 lots of visitors and therefore plenty of links themselves – increasing popularity, but they would also get an awful lot of spam.

But those who don’t like you leaving links, or just make it really difficult to do so will lose out on a lot of traffic. At the end of the day, it really depends on the subject of the site and whether it’s monetised in any way. Some of those that don’t like you leaving links will sometimes give each link an attribute that was introduced only a few years ago, the ‘nofollow’.

This attribute is entered as part of a standard link and is notified by the code rel=’nofollow’ near the ‘anchor’ tag. What this does is tell search spiders (the routines that search engines send out to examine the web) that the link it is about to look at should not be ‘followed’, in effect it should be ignored.

Now, many SEO experts disagree as to whether this actually means a link using ‘nofollow’ is completely pointless and some will show evidence that shows that it does actually make a difference and shouldn’t be discounted completely, however most will agree that if you’re going to look for links, make more of an effort on those that don’t use this attribute.

So now we just need to find out how to discover whether it’s nofollow or not and luckily it’s easy, you see the source of the page that you’re viewing will give the game away. If you’re using either Internet Explorer or Firefox this is easy, simply click on the ‘menu’ item and choose ‘view source’. You’ll be presented with what may look like a bunch of scary code but all you need to do is hit ‘ctrl-F’ to bring up the ‘find’ command and do a search for one of the links on the page. Then, simply look for ‘rel=nofollow’. If you find it and you’re just looking for links then you can move on, but if you want to stick around because you’re interested in the subject – check it out a bit deeper.

You see, it’s really not worth being too picky about these sites because those who don’t allow links probably have a greater value. They are less likely to be full of spam and therefore worth more in general social networking. Also, it could be that they allow links after you’ve given a bit back to the community.

So there you go, this link building lark isn’t as clean-cut and easy to quantify as many would have you think, but it is worth investigating and you could potentially get yourself not only some decent links to affect your rankings, but you may make a lot of worthwhile connections.