There are many ways to get links to a website. If you frequent the SEO forums enough, you will always see forum posting as one way to build links to a website. You post some messages on a forum and drop your signature and hope the search engines pick it up an credit you with the backlink.
There are four problems with this approach:
1. It assumes that the forum thread that you link dropped in actually gets indexed in the search engines.
2. If it looks obviously that you are posting message to get links rather than be a useful member of the community, then your message might get deleted and your account might get banned.
3. Forum owners aren’t exactly happy at their properties being used for this (see this on fluff posting in forums) and are adding the nofollow attribute to links, so the signature links do not count for anything.
4. Have a good look at any forum thread. They almost never get above a Google PR of 0. On each page, there are over 100 outgoing links (the header and footer links; navigation links; thread links; post links; profile links; thread tool links; post tool links; profile links; other signature links; etc). So the link juice that comes from a Google PR of close to 0 has to be divided by those >100 link. This means that your signature link is probably getting no link juice at all (I acknowledge ForumDr for this concept: Do forum signature links help a sites ranking?)
Some webmasters think that these signature links are worth it as they see the backlink in their Google Webmaster Tools, but just because a link is there does not mean it’s actually being counted for link juice.
Having said all that, there is nothing wrong with posting in forums to drop your signature to impress people, and they click on your links. This can be a useful source of traffic.
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