This will blow some minds - heads should be exploding pretty soon.

My signature has a link to a web site I have nothing to do with. I was reading it a while back, it was thought provoking, and I thought it was cooler than my signature, so I copied and pasted the whole quote, and a link came with it. Before I did that, I had links to a couple posts on my blog that I’m proud of.

My PageRank used to be 4, now it’s 5. Giving up forum signature links raised my PR. :eek:

Note that that isn’t a causal relationship - shedding forum links didn’t raise my PR, they just happened to occur at the same time. But on the other hand, it also shows that forum links can’t have been very well respected by search engines, if giving a bunch of them up happened at the same time that my PageRank increased from 4 to 5. And that’s the lesson we can all learn from my experience - if you’re looking for forum links, they won’t help you at all.