Google penalties for forum links

Looks like google are penalising sites for links from forums.
Oh well, lets give their own support forum a link from this forum for the information
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/UZPh0EPOXcE/dLpq3f_qbfUJ

Any kind of forum link can result in a spank according to that thread, be it a profile link, signature link or a link in a post

 

The jury is still out on this, no-one knows for sure, all the guru's refer to in link dropping, which they say includes profiles, some have taken that to mean copyright links too.

This is the answer John Mu gave on the forum, must say most people thought it was as clear as mud :
<quote>
Just to be absolutely clear, if you are dropping links to your site in other people's forums in the hope of gaming search engines, then that's considered web-spam and can be taking into account by both our algorithms and our manual web-spam teams. It doesn't matter how much "PR" the other site has, it doesn't matter if it's a .gov forum -- what you're doing would be considered web-spam by us.

If you care about how search engines like Google view your site, I'd recommend cleaning those link-drops up, removing the link to your site, and not doing that in the future.

Cheers
John
</quote>

 

^^Sounds to me like they are dictating way beyond democratic rights, who are they to say Jack can not post a link on my forum to promote something thats happening on his, this makes no sense if you think about it, if you can not link your forum or website then whats the point??

 

The problem is that John Mu is contradicting what Matt Cutts has been telling us for years is the way to go, the general concensus is, that it refers to links in footers that the owner has no option but to leave there, as in DragoByte MODS, and Theme coders, what Google are saying is that is spam.

 

Spammy forum links not all forum links

 

ALL [****][****][****][****]ed links API calls to.
SEO maps /sexe.bitch

ASS

 

So is having links in signatures to my website going to harm the results in search engines?

 

Yes, and no. Yes, for those links on the bottom of every forum page. Those are considered spam.
No, you can link your forum in signatures, and showcases. It's very much a "grey area" of backlinking.

Paid mods do this all the time.
Forum Software do this all the time.
Problem is, Google now sees those links as "spam," because the guy (John Mu, or someone else) that replaced Matt Cutts contradicts what Cutts been saying about backlinking. *rolleyes*