Make Affiliate Money

Whatever you think of DigitalPoint Forums with it’s constant spamming, newbies who can’t be bothered to do their own research, the lack of moderation (particularly in the Clickbank Section) and the bonkers “trigger happy” moderators who seem to ban people for no reason, it is very good for one thing, BACKLINKS.

Signature links are a valuable commodity on DigitalPoint and other forums which have the “do-follow” setting activated. They can provide direct traffic from people drawn by the Anchor Text, but more importantly for me they are links respected by Google that improve the Search Engine Results Position or SERPS.

There is an almost daily debate on DigitalPoint about whether forum signature links are good or bad and whether too many too quickly can damage your rep with Google. All I can tell you is that they have always been great for me, I have had sig links on my own profile ever since I could and more recently I have bought links from medium level posters.

I do believe the theory that too many links, too quickly can actually go against a site so I have not looked to buy from high post count members. I focus on buying at least 6 months from members with between 1000-2000 posts and who are averaging 5-10 posts a day. I have actually made what I consider to be good deals, I bought one link for 12 months from someone with 1800 posts for just $40 and this week I bought 3 links and an avatar from the same person for 12 months for just $12! They only have 400 posts at the moment, but that is still more than I have!

I verify all my sites with Google’s Webmaster Tools as this is the only way I am aware of that gives you the accurate number of links Google has trawled and one of my Forex sites is currently showing over 2500 links, almost all of them from digitalpoint. I assume if they were worthless then they wouldn’t list them!

There are risks involved with relying on either your own or another member’s sig links. The biggest threat is that you or the person you bought from gets banned by dp, when you are banned, even temporarily, then your signature is removed and therefore your links are not displayed and picked up by search engines.

You also have the risk that someone you bought links from could remove the links, especially if they got a better offer from someone else, this should not happen if they worry about their reputation or “itrader”, but I keep checking back to see that the people I bought from don’t remove the links. You must check that the links are correct and that they haven’t just put up your anchor text with their link.

The best way to protect against this sort of thing is to check their history, check their itrader and reputation. You will also get a feel for them by sending a PM to discuss the possible trade.

DigitalPoint have various rules about sig links, I have quoted them here for convenience, in case you are not aware of how they work and the minimum requirements to have one.

Our system has automatic signature guideline enforcement. Currently the restrictions are:

Up to 250 characters
No more than 3 lines
No more than 4 links
Images are not allowed
Adult links are not allowed
Signatures and live links within posts are not available to users until they have been a member at least 7 days, have positive (green) reputation and have at least 10 posts.

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