Thread: Is profile link building a black hat technique?

Totally agree.
I delete so many every day at various forums.
2 post wonders!
and those 2 posts are not even related to a thread they are dumped on.
Oh, delete and ban.

Originally Posted by robjones

Adding a sig to YOUR OWN REAL PROFILE is a perfectly legit method of giving a site a little traffic boost (note the word "little") if your posts garner attention and leads people to follow the link. I check out links of members in forums I frequent when their posts suggest they know their stuff and the site in the sig looks interesting.That's what profile links are for. They're a way to let other members find out more about the poster. They're a privilege the forum owner grants to members in return for participating. Nothing even mildly black hat about that.

That said, nobody will ever click on the link of a 2 post wonder or someone that speed posts fluff for count. And frankly I have serious doubts there's a gain in having a link for a Florida real estate company or a spa in Redondo Beach under posts that originate from the opposite side of the globe. All that tells me is some idiot is too lazy to post and too stupid to spend his marketing budget wisely.

Building stacks of dormant or useless profiles in one forum is frowned on if not prohibited by forums worth visiting, so a "link building campaign" that employs intentionally breaching and willful attempts at deception is by definition "black hat".

Another danger of this practice is the temptation presented by access to multiple profiles. Its just so easy to use them to bump threads, ask leading questions that the other id can use to showcase the product, or use them to praise the service of your other id. Nothing will destroy your credibility quite as fast as having someone point out that the guy that just complimented your integrity is really you. It is used to boost credibility, but when detected, demolishes it.

Like others that have spoken I have serious doubts about there being any boost for a site available from a massive profile spam campaign. In fact, it just tells people the owner of that site is not trustworthy, and if one persistently re-adds new spam profiles with the same link it paints a bullseye on that site for the mod team that raises red flags when that site is mentioned, so it accomplishes the exact opposite of a good marketing campaign.

As for using power tools... If you're looking for an seo and he proudly points to his Xrumer profile campaign, It's just a sign the "professional seo" involved is in reality not even a talented amateur. Just smile and put him on the list of vendors you will never work with, cause he's a wannabe.

Bottom line, profile link building is great if your goal is to take aim at your own foot and pull the trigger. It wont fool google, and it wont fool readers, so why do it? It has no effect if done in moderation, a harmful effect if implemented vigorously, and if the mods find out you're the one doing it you won't even keep your own real profile. Waste-o-time.

Originally Posted by 5starpix

I have done my share of testing and from my results, I was very confident that profile link building has very minimal to no effect on the SERPs. However, you could try your own testing and see if it does work for you. If it does work for you, I would be very interested in seeing what you did to get positive results.

Agree!! I also have examined it has no effect on SERP .. It's better to work on other SEO method for better SERPs' rather then working an hours on this

Saw a guy speed posting 1-2 pieces of garbage per minute on DP the other day. No doubt a part of a brilliant siglinks marketing campaign.

Only problems with that theory are:

-1- DP has no-follow sigs unless you're a premium member, and he wasn't.
-2- the sigs are not visible to anyone that isn't logged in... And I doubt google bots login to crawl the place.
-3- he was adding crap at a high rate of speed, so it was going to get reported. Literally one every minute for hours, like posting itself was a full time job. They let him keep doing it until he had over 800 posts, then spam canned them all.

What he did was literally waste over 100 man hours generating links a bot couldn't see, nobody would click on intentionally, and useless as they were already... are now gone. I'm thinking the time could have been better spent. Right now he's throwing a fit in their forum, too dumb to know the problem is not DP, the problem is he's unfit to do a job more complex than shining shoes.

Do not use Profile Creation for backlinking. It is better to use this technique for branding. The biggest problem with this technique is you need to update profiles at a particular interval else you lost. Most people just create the profile and leaves them, that's the reason they lost it. Don't do it. Create less profiles and do some updates at regular interval and you will see the difference.

Google bot doesn't need a login to crawl. The stuff will still be crawled (if not no-follow). I have seen many search results that need login to view that clearly means that those were indexed...

Originally Posted by robjones

-2- the sigs are not visible to anyone that isn't logged in... And I doubt google bots login to crawl the place.

Originally Posted by ChillingBreeze

Google bot doesn't need a login to crawl. The stuff will still be crawled (if not no-follow). I have seen many search results that need login to view that clearly means that those were indexed...

Googlebot doesnt need a login to crawl, but the sigs at DP are only visible to logged in members. Try looking at DP without logging in.

Regardless, ALL DP non-premium member sigs are no-follow. That was instituted in 2011.

Premium member sigs there are "no-follow" IF they trip an algorithm that determines them as spammy.

True, google can not see the links.
Shawn the man said so, and he would never lead anyone astray (laugh later please).
Now for the signature links.
True they are no follow, and one will not get any juice from them.
But, and here it the but....
Those links are still good for traffic.
As it is still happening in that all threads in DP, new and old, are well indexed by google.
Searching for stuff on google brings up a lot of DP threads and posts.

(of course, one must be logged in to see them but hey, look at how many people are logged in at any given time)

Originally Posted by iowadawg

As it is still happening in that all threads in DP, new and old, are well indexed by google.
Searching for stuff on google brings up a lot of DP threads and posts.

(of course, one must be logged in to see them but hey, look at how many people are logged in at any given time)

The guest traffic is 10x more the logged in. But like you said DP has a lot of content indexed.

Just for curiosity sake, I did a comparison of the members logged-in at DP versus the total of members/guests on Netbuilders at the the time of this post.

Netbuilders gives you 16% of the eyeballs. But you get a do-follow links and the threads aren't buried as fast.

Hi,

Isn't the most important thing from a link is to get traffic? Some how I think that taking the time to have tons of pointless links buried all over the net is a waste of time.

Please explain to me if I am wrong here, but lets say you spend 3hrs a day on link buildings. I feel that getting one good link that brings people to the site is better then 100 links that get no clicks and very few people see.

I don't think it is a matter of NO follow and do follow.

Sami

Exactly. It is far more better to get 10 quality and meaningful links than to get 1000 links those meaningless. And we create links with the traffic purpose more than the rank purpose but still it matters more for the rank of the site and the page. So if one get dofollow links then it is good but if can not then it is also beneficial indirectly to get site and web pagerank increase.