I’ve written before and discussed how important backlinks are. Without them you will never stand a chance against your competitors, even though you’ve spent hours optimizing your site.
One of the most popular methods to build backlinks the last few years have been link exchanges and forums. Even though forums have been used a lot less recently there’s still plenty of bloggers promoting this method.
When trying to build backlinks through forums it’s important to understand that spam will never work since forums are more often than not allergic to spam and your thread will probably be removed within a few minutes, depending on how popular the site is.
How to build backlinks through forums
- Find relevant forums
- Pick the best forums and join them
- Set up your signature
- Participate
Find relevant forums
Finding relevant forums becomes an easy task thanks to Google. Just search for “niche + forum” and you’ll most certainly get a few different alternatives.
Picking the best forums
Picking the best forums may be a bit more difficult. Check age of the forum, if it’s active, if it’s SEO-optimized, etc. Just make sure that it’s easy to find new threads to participate in without spamming.
Set up your signature
Here you’ll be using bbcode, so make sure that this particularly forum has it before spending time registering. This is how you should style your link:
Learn how to find a [url=http://domain.com/]title to optimize[/url] today!
Remember to use a catchy phrase without making it sound to much like spam. With this method you can receive both backlinks and visitors, so make sure other members want to visit your site.
Participate
Every post you write will contain your link in the signature, so there’s no need to write spamlike and link to your site in every post. On the other hand it might be a good idea when you’ve written a post on the particularly subject.
Try to write informative and interesting posts. If you help a member on a forum they will most certainly visit the site in your signature, giving you more than just a backlink again.
Why this is a bad method
This method have been a bad idea for several years now even if it’s still popular to promote it. On every forumpage there are hundreds of links to different pages. You’ll only receive a small amount of link power which makes several other methods more useful.
Since Google change about nofollow this method became even more useless and I doubt that anyone will promote it within a few months.
If you’re already active on a forum within your niche, add your signature. If you’re not active and is thinking about using this method only to receive backlinks, stay tune for a better method!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with most of what you have said, but for me forums are more useful for getting targeted traffic to your site. Its not about the backlink because we all know that a backlink from a a forum that is nofollowed and has 3000 links out from that one page is essentially useless. What is of value is the traffic you can get from it, just remember that typically the only ones who will get quality traffic from a forum are those that are a respected member of that community, if you spam everyone will ignore you.
I agree with you Jesse. If you participate in the discussions and share your knowledge you will get traffic and at the same time create better relationships with other bloggers. With that said I think you can do this even better with blog commenting, mail and guest blogging.
Now that you said that, I realize that forum marketing isn’t
that great. You’re right about the amount of PR you get
for every link…
The funny thing is that I spent couple of month doing that to
build PR for my blog
Igor
That’s the thing with experience. We learn new things every day and in the end we can only use the information to save us from doing the same thing again and hopefully help someone else from doing it as well.
Just a question: if I decide to buy some backlinks packs from internet, like from amazon or ebay, what happens? I can see some strange vendors like abcmarketing, activeSEO, aladygma-marketing, what are they?
Seach engines will penalize your site for this and eventually there’s a chance it will be dropped from the search engines. Instead you should focus on natural backlinks. Convey people into linking back to you simply because you deliver great content.