Forum Signatures

In my opinion, I think there's no definitive answer as to whether links to signatures or posts work or not. But I guess many are using it consciously or unconsciously.

Folks aren't putting links in sigs to generate click-throughs, they're doing it to help index their site and to add a quick external link to their page.

There are the spammers who add a word or two to a forum or blog with an external link - I get that all the time with my blog. Scum.

However, for those that participate in a community and actually add something of value to the conversation, if the forum admins allow a sig link or two, you're not doing your site a favor by not taking advantage of it. Forums are crawled very frequently by the search engines because they represent updated content and are usually made of clean code that the engines can easily navigate. If you're having trouble indexing a page or have one in the Supplementals, just link to it from your forum sig and you should be indexed in no time.

Some forums have gone to the practice of putting re=nofollow attribs on all links in posts. But I feel that if you're contributing to the content of a forum (and thereby increasing it's value to the search engines) you should be allowed an external link or three for the trouble.

Just my opinion tho.