Links in signature blocks

[Blocker]

Something came up today that I would like to draw your attention to.

Linking to a youtube or other video site in your signature block (in your profile) is bad voodoo for the forum, but ok in a forum post.

Google and Bing (Bing being the worst search engine in the world) crawl through our forum and website looking for new information and lists it in their database. The more common things you post in threads, the more important Google recognizes us as a valuable information source and ranks mySandman higher in search results. (Are you still with me, or have you lost interest?)

For example go to www.google and type these following search words;

Holden Sandman
centre console sandman
hood lining panel van

As you can see we rank 1st (barring sales websites who pay to be on top).


Anyway - when someone creates a signature in the forum to another site, or more specifically youtube. Google is smart enough to know that this referral link occurs many times in this forum and starts to think we are creating spam or fake ranking points... in turn Google starts to penalize mySandman for search results moving us down the search results page (bad).


If I have kept your attention long enough through this nerd rant, I appreciate it... go forth and post.

[Innuendo]

I'm not sure you should care all that much about Google rankings Blocker.
People who are interested will make their way here anyway. Google rankings are about driving traffic for sales and as your not selling anything...

Sure it's your forum and if you want to implement a rule that's fine. I doubt anybody has added a signature link to screw up search engine rankings.
That said, Google move the goal posts all the time.

Not sure why you care?

[Blocker]

Yes they do move the goal posts, and more recently they are eliminating some sites from search results because they farm links or try to boost ranks.

You are right I am not selling anything, but I do want people who may not be computer/internet savvy to type in Holden Sandman, or just Sandman and they do not have to trawl through irrelevant links to webpages to find us.

[Innuendo]

I think if you have the relevant information on the site you will always rate highly on the search engines regardless.

Maybe more info on the site (aside from the forum) will make sure you keep it that way.