I just had a thought about links on VB forums.

[Ashley]

A lot of forums are disabling sigs to non members and this is making some members upset on SEO/webmaster forums as they see the link as paid for by posting.

How about using the members list as a directory.

Disable to guests a-z, profile link, all the sort by links and order it by top posters and enable the URL field to show to guests.

[Michael]

Wouldn't this just diminish the value of those links though? By creating a singular page to host the URL which would be surrounded by (on average at least) 14 other external links it would make it quite difficult for search engines to assume particular importance to an individual link, if any. With the implementation of the vBSEO Conditional Signature plugin however, you will find that you can reward members who make a post exceeding a particular character limit, or have made in access of X posts by not adding a rel="nofollow" attribute, or removing the signature completely. This way you are rewarding loyal and active members, whilst also ensuring members who are posting large content are getting rewarding with a linkback to their appopriate website.

[Oleg Ignatiuk]

[OT]Ashley, looks like you forgot to update your forums URL in signature [/OT]

[Ashley]

[OT]Ashley, looks like you forgot to update your forums URL in signature [/OT]

Done lol. Updated htaccess, I had disabled it while I was using a sub domain.

Wouldn't this just diminish the value of those links though? By creating a singular page to host the URL which would be surrounded by (on average at least) 14 other external links it would make it quite difficult for search engines to assume particular importance to an individual link, if any. With the implementation of the vBSEO Conditional Signature plugin however, you will find that you can reward members who make a post exceeding a particular character limit, or have made in access of X posts by not adding a rel="nofollow" attribute, or removing the signature completely. This way you are rewarding loyal and active members, whilst also ensuring members who are posting large content are getting rewarding with a linkback to their appopriate website.

No as said it would need to use conditions to only show the WWW button to guests so the only links would be navbar, footers, header, members homepage URL and page number (which you can also tweak).

I don't use the vBSEO Conditional Signature plug-in (look how we help with keywords) nor do I wish to as I have had signatures tuned off to guests from day one. Before I moved to root my forum like here had a member page of pr4 so it is giving them a link on a page with pr4. I use sigs to stop spam as I ask mebers that want to sell something to put address, links etc in thier sig.


Edit: I will post some screen shots and URL when I'm done also I forgot to mention the A-Z had to go.