Do forum links carry link popularity? Do they get spidered and indexed by the search engines? Does their anchor text get counted?
The answer appears to be no with all of the major search engines. This information comes via a test conducted by Will.Spencer of Digitalpoint, who runs the Internet Search Engines FAQ website.
Other tests have been relatively inconclusive in the past, and forum signatures and links still appear in Yahoo!’s linkdomain command with some frequency, but it appears not to have any influence over either SERPs or PageRank.
