Do forum links help PageRank and SERPS?

[SEREP]

The Search Engine Reverse Engineering Project is conducting a test to answer two questions:

1. Do forum message body links help PageRank and SERPS?
2. Do forum signature links help PageRank and SERPS?

This post is part of that test.

This post will contain two links, one in the message body and another in the message signature.

Each of these links will contain a unique string of anchor text which will be linked to web pages with no other inbound links.

Using this testing methology, we hope to be able to provide scientifically valid answers to these two questions.

For a full description of our testing methodology, please visit the links above.

Thank you for your participation in our study!

Message Body Test Link: AISEFForumMessageBody

[Cheater]

WOW! Cool Project! Need any help?

I have found a little problem with your signature link (internet-search-engines-faq.com/forum-message-body-links-pr-serps-test-page-DO-NOT-LINK.shtml).
It ends with LINK.shtml which Google may penalise.

You have one big task ahead of you!

[SEREP]

It's funny that you should mention that, because that's another test which we are waiting for results on in the next Google PR/Backlinks update.

That test is: Do search engines penalize pages named links.shtml.

[Cheater]

Yeah I noticed that.

Keep us informed of the results.

[DFC]

I would think (but I'm not an SEO expert) that it depends entirely on the forum page's PR? A good place to post is usenet discussion (as long as it's somewhat relevant - I'm not in favour of spamming), which usually has PR (in my limited experience. ).

[Cheater]

Usenet itsself doesnt have PR since its not even based on the web but the web to usenet gateways (like Google Groups) do have PR so thats interesting.

[chovy]

I used to have a lot of links from other forums, but about 6 months ago, they pretty much dropped out, except a few big ones.

[discountdomains]

A lot of forums don't allow signatures to be crawled by the SE's if you view Google's cache you can tell if they show or not.

I have found the same, that some forum links show and others don't it also tends to change once a forum grows past a certain point.

Clare

[SEREP]

Searching on Google for the unique string in the message body returns 18 results, none of which are the target page.

Searching on Google for the unique string in the message signature returns 7 results, none of which are the target page.

It's still too early for conclusive results, but it doesn't look good for building relevance by posting in web forums.

[Gatorhardware.com]

Any link that is crawled is going to help you. If you can get the link and you stay away from link farms you are doing good. A lot of forum software is able to be crawled and have links picked up. I have seen a few sites that most of there links are from forum post/signatures.