Some days ago, I posted a short article titled 3 Major Ways, One Fundamental tip for Blog’s Traffic in reply of someone’s request. While they were such wonderful tips, the second of the three tips prompted an argument which led to this post. The argument focused on the act of dropping links on forums as a good SEO practice or extremely bad one (and to be sincere, I kind of made a little blunder which I intend on correcting here). By extreme, it counter-attack your site leaving its ruins at the backyard of SEO’s house.

Before i continue with today's jargons, you may need to read the post link above before continuing or better still, Follow the source link below.

I quote my second point again

Drop a signature. When your mouth is not available to talk, let your hand do that for you. [s]It is not a crime to write your blog url address beneath each of your posts on forums, is it?[/s] Or use a moniker that easily tell the world about your your brand. For example, toheebDOTcom is my moniker, and i am very sure after the first six letters of my moniker you know it is a url address.

Now, let’s go back to our discussion. As you can see on #tip 2, i cancelled out something I feel is not entirely true. Well, let’s take the journey and see for ourselves.
NB: All quotes has a link to their source. For verification, you may need to visit the Source below.

It became clean clear when the Head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutt, wrote an article titled “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO”. He clearly stated in the first paragraph the effect of Guest Blogging…

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

If that’s not straight forward enough, or you want to guest he’s not talking about forum links, wait a minute; John Mueller re-iterated it again in reply of a post on Google Product Forums that …

Just to be absolutely clear, if you are dropping links to your site in other people’s forums in the hope of gaming search engines, then that’s considered web-spam and can be taking into account by both our algorithms and our manual web-spam teams. It doesn’t matter how much “PR” the other site has, it doesn’t matter if it’s a .gov forum — what you’re doing would be considered web-spam by us.

If you care about how search engines like Google view your site, I’d recommend cleaning those link-drops up, removing the link to your site, and not doing that in the future.

But it hasn’t started out bad, Matt Cutt said more about this in the article

Ultimately, this is why we can’t have nice things in the SEO space: a trend starts out as authentic. Then more and more people pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate behavior remains. We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral where people are hawking “guest post outsourcing” and writing articles about “how to automate guest blogging.”

What have we got to do? because a link on a forum with a million users has a potential traffic! Do Google and her people meant we don’t need to do this at all? Not really, there is in fact a logical statement in Google’s Webmaster quality Guidelines

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

And yes, we can conclude that one Forum Link doesn’t hurt. But, how many does?

The simple answer is – We don’t know! I guess this is one thing being kept away from us.

What if we need to drop multiple links? then we use an attribute on other links. It is called a nofollow link

What is a nofollow link?

nofollow is an attribute value of rel, created by Google, to prevent robots from following individual links on a page.

You will want to use the attribute on any of the following case examples as stated by Google.
** text removed (not really neccessary) ** ** but you may check the source below if you are stubborn to know

How do you create a nofollow link?
All you need to do is insert rel="nofollow" along with a's href attribute. Want a clear example? see the source below.

And I need to tag some people, as i don't want to offend Nairaland bots let me tag the two people that prompted the argument: Speakdatruth, vocalwalls.


Source: toheebDOTcom

cant you just post like a professional... I mean be able to arrange the post in order and simple understanding....

.

sam6055:
cant you just post like a professional... I mean be able to arrange the post in order and simple understanding....

It will be kind of you for an illustration. That will be great! Thanks