Taking out Forum signatures

[enhu]

I've read somewhere that having tons of backlinks ion one website may result to loss of rank, if this is true should I just remove my signature links to my forum accounts?

 

[Sam1]

I've read somewhere that having tons of backlinks ion one website may result to loss of rank, if this is true should I just remove my signature links to my forum accounts?

I didn't think signatures particularly harmed your ranking but I did read this: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4573312.htm. A lot of forums now will use nofollow on signature links anyway. You should definitely work at increasing your numbers of links from a variety of sites. I did think of an option which might work if you wanted to keep your traffic but not the SEO: A URL shortener. Apparently Google does count the link juice from most Url shorteners so what you could do is create a custom one using http://yourls.org/ and create a robots.txt file to disallow google or something (http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html). Seems to be a lot of effort though. Another option on most forums is to enable and disable signatures on certain posts. That way you could only enable the signature on some posts.

However Google is so hard to please that I wouldn't be too bothered.

 

[enhu]

Thanks to the advice, maybe using their own goo.gl will work well...
My problem actually is that I lose my rank on yahoo and google search engine, I'm not sure how I can get it back on top. How can i start to analyze what is wrong, is there any webtools I can use to identify what goes wrong to my website?

 

[Sam1]

Thanks to the advice, maybe using their own goo.gl will work well...
My problem actually is that I lose my rank on yahoo and google search engine, I'm not sure how I can get it back on top. How can i start to analyze what is wrong, is there any webtools I can use to identify what goes wrong to my website?

I'm by no means an SEO expert, which you probably got from this post: http://www.webgurubb.com/threads/surviving-the-google.3827/. However if you are loosing your ranking that suggests that either a) You have made a change which has impacted on your ranking (whether that is doing something or not doing something) or b) Google has changed their algorithm and it has impacted on your site. I don't know how any sites would help you apart from, perhaps, the Google webmaster tools.

A few questions:

Have you been specifically optimising your site? Google has targeted overly optimised sites in the past.

Are you continuing to pump out fresh content onto your site?

Have you purchased any links or is there any reason why you would have a bulk amount of links pointing to your site?

 

[enhu]

I have not changed much on my website though but I have specifically optimized my site for the local search. This is because my site is particularly intended for a city. I'm talking about a travel guide particularly for a single city so this I think is a must for such site. Do you think this is the reason?

Lets say my keyword is "California Travel Guide" should I just change this instead when my domain say californiatravels.com? (this is just an example so don't browse on it)

 

[deansaliba]

I have not changed much on my website though but I have specifically optimized my site for the local search.

Like Sam I am no SEO expert, but I would assume this is the problem, I'm guessing you might have done a bit too much too soon?