Backlinks from non-relevant site

[emh1969]

There's a forum I used to participate in that allows you to include a link to your website in your signature block.  I have over 500 posts in the forum so that provides a lot of backlinks to my website.

However, I recently decided to remove my website link from my signature for two reasons:

1. The forum is 95-99% dead.  Hardly anyone uses it anymore.  BTW, the website that houses the forum is still popular within is niche (articles, etc).  Just the forum appears to be dead.

2. The website and its forum really have no connection whatsoever to my business.  I'm in a completely different niche.

However, I have no idea if I've made the right decision. Will removing my signature and the backlinks hurt my site?  Or will it help it since the other site really isn't related to mine?

Thanks for any thoughts on this!

[Travis_Bailey]

It could be seen as a link of little value for all of the reasons you stated. If your site had a vast preponderance of little but forum links that pass juice/equity with exact match anchor text, like 'buy nike shoes', you would be heading into a possible penalty. That would show intent toward manipulation.

So the short answer is: Removing the links isn't going to help your site, but if they're truly removed they aren't going to hurt your site.

There would be other things to consider, if the forum related to your business. Some things to consider are referrals and conversions from referrals. But since you stated that the forum is unrelated, I won't worry about that.

If you haven't read this yet, it's a good idea that you do. Staying within those guidelines, and avoiding anything in the grey will generally keep your site in good standing from a linking perspective.

[emh1969]

Thanks Travis!  That's kind of what I was thinking but wanted to make sure.

I have one other question.  When I run site explorer on my website, those backlinks from the forum still show up even though I deleted the signature link about 10 days ago.  Will these eventually go away on their own?  Or do I need to actively remove them?

[Travis_Bailey]

I really don't know how that forum handles sigs, so I can't say for certain. What you can do is check a handful of your old posts at random, if the sig is gone - the links are gone.

The problem with all link data, even Google Webmaster Tools, is that it's never up to date. Mozbot, Googlebot and all the various crawlers have to crawl the links to show us link data. It can take a while between removal and another crawl, so the answer is 'patience'.

[emh1969]

Thanks Travis, that's exactly what I wanted to know!  The links are definitely gone from my forum posts so I assumed it was a crawl issue but wasn't 100% sure.  Thanks again for all your help!!!