How Participating in Message Forums Can Increase Your PageRank

Message forums are a great way to meet people, exchange ideas, find answers, and just to pass time. Most likely, many of you have already participated in online forums in the past. You probably still have active accounts that you have just neglected because you felt you didn’t have a need to participate in that message forum anymore. Well, it’s time to re-activate those accounts because they can bring instant PageRank to your website.

Many message forums allow you to have a signature that is automatically added at the end of your message posts. Some forums allow you to have links in your signature. If you’re like me several years ago, you would have your Facebook or MySpace page in your signature. How about changing your signature to link to your website?

Signatures dynamically gets updated when you change it. So if you had posted 10 messages in that forum, you will now have 10 back links to your website. If you had replied to 500 messages over the years, you will now have 500 back links to your website. This alone can increase your PageRank overnight.

However, Google realized that this practice can be abused. So take the following into consideration:

The message forum must be relevant to your website. If your website sells guitars, having back links from a holistic nutrition forum is not going to help.

If the message forum is already relevant, it will help even further if the message where your link appears is also relevant. Having a back link where the topic is talking about something off topic is not going to help much.

From the 2 points above, the most important is the second. Even if the message forum is not relevant, if the topic where your message appears is relevant to your website, it will help. However, if the whole website is relevant, there will be more relevant pages where your back link will appear.

So pull out your notepad create a list of the message forums that you used to be a part of. Revisit them and change your signatures from non-performing assets, to traffic-generating minions.