[StarLab]

I was doing my morning ritual of checking my website on the various search engines when noticed something.

Google seems to be the only SE which does not index entries from forums sigs in posts. Every other SE seems to list these except Google. Backlink checkers report hundreds of entries on various forums I visit. Google does, however, show the sig entry for profile pages only, just not posts.

Is this the result of abuse in Signature Spam?

I'm the admin on another forum and have recently noticed a rash of spammers (almost 100 for Dec) joining just to add a sig to their account, never to return. Doesn't matter anyway as I don't allow public viewing of profiles on this particular forum. Members only...

Has anyone else noticed this?

[StarLab]

Sigh, strange... nothing was showing earlier, but now they are there.

Disregard this post. Was just a temporary hickup, apparently...

[Jerlene]

Not really. It's not really signature spam but people did use them strictly for backlinks and Google caught onto it.
During the last update, they really picked up the slack and switched things up a lot.
Signatures being one of those changes.

[StarLab]

Actually, they are now appearing under "repeat search with omitted results"

They're still there, but not in the primary search results.

[Jerlene]

Of course they'll be there, just like link farms, but they won't count, just like link farms.

[StarLab]

Oh well, I guess they still get word out if people are reading your posts...

[Jerlene]

Definitely. That's what I put my sites in my signatures for.
I couldn't care less for the backlink.

[mann3r]

Well I just place it in for some free traffic, don't care enough about forums sig backlink

[robert]

Well, I can report that precharge.net/forums/ has about 95,000 pages on Google and receives about 500 google clicks a day. Hope that helps ;)

[StarLab]

According to the backlink checker I use: 94,400 to be exact. :) I'm sure that fluctuates depending on which checker you use.

And yes, it does help.