Signing guest books

[jjensen347]

Are there any legitimate (both socially acceptable and white hat seo) ways to use a guest book to build links? It is relatively common practice for an SEO pro to use forums to build via a link in the signature. As long as it is on topic and a valid contribution to the conversation forum moderators seem to be fine with it.

Anybody have experience or thoughts on it?

Joe Jensen

[BuckfastMonk]

complete waste of time.

however, if you were an authoritive voice in a local community I don't see any problems with it.

[debraM]

I haven't seen an active guest book in a while Joe, but then I don't look for them either so my comments aren't based on experience.

If the book is on a well ranked site and the page is indexed, I see no problem with leaving a comment/link. Some say certain search engines give more link popularity "juice" to links that emanate from aged pages, stands to reason an old active guestbook on a "better" site would be ok.

But - while a link is a link, leaving off topic comments and links on unrelated guestbooks isn't a good idea or "socially acceptable" as you put it.

This type of link building isn't given the highest credibility points with engines, SEO's or the community at large. It's kinda 1999.

It is relatively common practice for an SEO to use forums to build via a link in the signature.

Well yes and no. I participated on another forum for years and did it for a lot of reasons, NONE of which was a linkback. Smart consultants know good exposure to the right people trumps a backlink any day. :)

[Jazajay]

I agree that related links from forums and guest books (have to admit haven't seen any for a while, same as debraM i dont look for them either) can get you traffic via click thoughs but apart from that i wouldn't pay any attention most guest books and forums just simply add rel=nofollow to the link. this means the link displays normally and works but search engines wont follow the link therefore it is useless from a link equity point of view.

Also you have to think of spamming, search engines relised early on that people where just posting links from guest books to get back links that is one reason in my opinion why there a not many round anymore, if there are and i'm just blind and stupid please let me no lol.

I mean if search engines can check the ip address of links to try and see if sites that link to each other are on the same ip (host) or close by they can easy devalue link equity from any guest or forum page aswell. Otherwise members who publish 1000's of posts on several different forums could easy spam the system with thousands of 1 way backlinks.

debraM put it beautifully by saying"Smart consultants know good exposure to the right people trumps a backlink any day"
But also several high quailty backlinks from sites that are 100% relavant will be better than 20/30/40/50+ links from forums with out rel=nofollow any way

Consontrate on other forms of link building search engines are not stupid and if you underestimate them you will probly be doing yourself some harm plus the amount of wasted time you would be spending building usless links could be easy redirected to building good relevant links.