I recently had a client want me to go ahead and purchase a package through ForumLinkBuilding.com and I will admit I’ve heard of them before, but never paid too much attention. I will warn you I’m not one to bash people but I’d to give you my opinion on why you should not use this service as it’s pretty much spam. I still think Link building with forum signatures can be a viable option if you’re heavily involved within the community, and the forum is related to your niche.
So they offer 3 different packages which include link building on a wide range of forums, niche related or not, it doesn’ matter. The packages also come with some directory submissions and what not…pretty standard. The prices for the packages range from $400-$7000….yes $7000 for apparently 6,000 guaranteed one way links. I first thought there is no way a human is active in the forums contributing in any positive way possible so I set off to see for myself and my client.
They have a client testimonial section which links to actual clients and their domains. This made it real easy for me to analyze the backlink profile of those sites listed, as well the companies main domain. For all the clients there were only a few forum signature links showing up in their profiles, and the posts checked out to what I guessed all along. Sure enough the forum posts that were still active came from bot generated accounts with 1-3 posts, and those posts were always along the lines of “this post has a lot of great information in it” etc etc etc. Not only that but those clients were not ranking anywhere for the keywords they were targeting. No surprise there either.
This was just one of dozens of examples of the forum posting you’re getting and a lot of the accounts I came across were of course banned. The company itself uses its own services to promote their link building packages, a lot of it came from forums but at least they were webmaster forums. That’s fine and legit, they all have services sections. But diving deeper more of the same spam was easily noticable with a quick glance using Link Diagnosis.
Google search results for forum member names used lead me on more discoveries of the same type of spam all over the place. So one of the few things we can get out of this is that if you want to get links out of forum signatures you’re going to have to put some human effort into it, and not be spammy. Needless to say I had to inform my client that going this route would be in poor judgement and be only hurtful in the long run. I do not condone techniques like this but I’ll let the rest of you folks be the judge of that.
More Scammed: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=9299500
