Do you think signatures should be visible to guests & bots?

Total nonsense. I can see how some forums don't want signatures (too much clutter). All in all I don't believe that it is the other members we are targeting, but rather the much higher amount of guests who are lurking and looking for something specific. There are hosting people and merchant account providers who get most of their business from forums, and I don't mean the rankings the signatures generate. I think the decision shouldn't have anything to do with search engine related matters, but if the forum owner believes that it's ok for the members to get some exposure to their business or not.

 

On my general chat forum i have nofollow on all the links, not only that you have to register to see them. This is just another insentive for people to register. If i was running a webmaster forum however id turn the nofollow off and let visitors view the signatures. I might as well give something back to my members.

-edit-

Oooops, i have accidently voted for the wrong thing.

 

I have to be honest and say that I do like it when some forums don't have signatures. I don't like huge sigs. And a lot of posts made would not be there, or would be better if it wasn't for the sideeffect of gaining rankings.

there are other great members who wouldn't bother posting if it wasn't for the nice sideeffect. I'm not even talking about DP right now, but some niche forums which have an enormous power increasing rankings to content related sites' pages in the signatures. more effective than the ones on DP (if the content is related and deeplinks into the right pages).

So like I've said, it should be up to what the forum owner is comfortable with, both ways are ok.

I don't like the non follow thing too much. I think that whatever the human eye sees, search engines should see as well.

 

adding a link to a sig to a busy forum can be a quick way to get a new site indexed. If they weren't available to bots and guests what would be the point in having them?

 

Every link in the forum redirects you to registration page. Nofollow is just in the signature. This actually reminds me to change a few things. I have a combination of mods that dont quite mix.

 

Yeah, hold on, I need to do that on my new blogparty forum

 

I'll follow links in a sig if the post catches my attention or the sig itself does. That's not the kind of thing that a guest would be likely to do. Having said that, I do think the sig links should be visible to all.

 

As I've said elsewhere, I think forum sig links are a small (very small) reward for forum posters, without whom the forum would not exist. I don't think they should be turned off for guests or bots and I don't think they should be nofollow'ed, either.

It costs the forum owner nothing. Disable sig graphics if you're worried about bandwidth. The live links themselves obviously don't affect bandwidth at all because they don't do anything until someone clicks on them, And if you are a forum owner who still believes that allowing live links is going to "bleed PR" or "leak PR", perhaps you really shouldn't be running a forum at all.