I go to quite a few SEO forums about everyday to read posts and see what everybody is up to. When I see the signature links that everyone leaves behind, they usually are not SEO related. I was taught if you backlink from forums, make sure your doing it from a forum that is relevant to your website. However, on SEO forums, I see quite the opposite. Signature links from pet supplies to credit cards – this obviously has nothing to do with the rule of relevancy.

However, I am guilty of this myself. I leave backlinks from SEO forums that don’t relate to my websites. So why do I do this? Well, with my experience from the last two years, I’ve found that the backlinks do in fact help my websites within the SERPs. I know that backlinking should be a forum of advertisement or promotion, but I’ve used them to give my sites more exposure in organic search.

I do know that you don’t have to backlink everyday – in fact, if you do it daily, it may hurt you. However, if you backlink every other day, it should help your website move up. Strange as it might seem, leaving signature links from SEO sites from what I’ve seen the past two years, does indeed work. I’m not saying you should only backlink from these type of forums, but it should be part of your backlinking campaign.

I have tried doing the same from related forums and really haven’t seen it work effectively as the former. I know that everyone says to backlink from related niche forums, but I just haven’t found a great reason why I should do this. It really doesn’t work that well.

Time and time again – I’ve experimented with not only my own websites but my clients’ as well by doing this type of technique, and for the most part, it does work as far as me getting on the first page of a certain niche. I’m not saying that it will get you to the first page every time, but it will move you up 90 percent of the time. So I do believe that everyone should try this technique to see if it does work for them.

I have found another little secret. If you stop backlinking, the website will drop a few spots, sometimes more. What I do is that if I do get a site to the first page, I keep backlinking then withdrawal gradually until I’m not doing it anymore. It usually stays where it’s at.

My theory about why using backlinks from SEO forums is this: the popular SEO forums are heavily visited, so if you leave a link there, because the site has heavy traffic to it, then Google must think that you are leaving a link on a very popular site (in which you are). True or not, all I know that it does work – maybe not all the time, but enough for me to make it a priority when I backlink.