Ahh, good one.
Posts made by LesleyPaone
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RE: Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
It really depends on the web host whether they will follow it or not. Some that are soley based in the UK might not. If they have US based servers or the site is hosted in the US more than likely they will. It is worth a shot though, I try to rattle as many cages as possible. Here is a little info on filing them in the UK https://www.teneric.co.uk/marketing/copyright-infringement.html
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RE: Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
This is really a decision that you need to make. It is akin to asking what kind of vehicle you should buy. If I were in your situation what I would do is write out a feature list that I want and find which platform closely integrates with it.
Also, if you are not on a hard deadline play with them all before you make a decision. Then you will know what you are getting into.
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RE: Site been plagiarised - duplicate content
After they drop out of the searches google will index your site as a the canonical site with that content on it. So that part happens manually. Also, when you relaunched, did you redirect everything from the old site? That helps preserve link juice and at the same time gives search engines a pointer that the address of a page has changed to this new address.
One thing I would suggest is having a DMCA take down notice draft and sent to the host as well. If the other people you send letters to tell you to go pound sand, normally the host does not.
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RE: Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
No problem, people sharing knowledge is what makes a community great.
To answer your question I missed above, Prestashop is free, all you need it web hosting.
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RE: Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
Out of the box I think the supported ones are paypal standard and adaptive, blue pay, authorize.net, cod, bank wire, first data, hipay, moneybookers, payment sense. Those are the US ones I remember off the top of my head, but you can get a module for any gateway really. I made one for NMI I have for free download on my site, there is a stripe one floating around too that is free also.
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RE: Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
When clients ask me to use Wordpress for an e-commerce site, I not only say no, I say hell no. Wordpress is not a scalable solution with a myriad of other issues. Let me list the issues I have with Wordpress as an ecommerce store.
Security, it is just not secure. Most ecommerce applications use a two authentication system, not to be confused with a two factor authentication system. Like Prestashop what it does is has a login for the admins and a separate login for the customers. They are not handled by the same code, the same page, or the same system. Wordpress uses only one system, so where an admin would login, so would a client. This is insecure in so many ways in my mind. One, how many password attempts do you wait before you lock someone out? It could be a legitimate user that gets locked out costing you a sale. But at the same time, if you do not lock them out, they can write a script that for days uses different ip addresses to try to crack your admin password. On ecommerce systems most allow you to select an admin directory. Wordpress's is site.com/wp-login. Prestashop or Magento it could be site.com/3490834admin or what ever you feel like using.
Another issue is features. There really are not many, sure there are plugins that are developed by God knows who, but Wordpress was never meant to be an ecommerce platform so it lacks a lot of the valuable features. Most Prestashop sites I work on (I keep using Prestashop not to push it, but it is really the only platform I develop with) only use 2 -4 modules that are not part of the package. Usually they are like an obscure payment gateway, a module that connect to quickbooks, or a shipping module. Stats, products, features, cms, it is all held internally by the application. When it takes 30 modules by 30 different people to make a site, it will be insecure, there are no two ways about it. Something will also conflist as well breaking something. Plus there are not modules for half the features a real ecommerce platform has available for Wordpress. Sure you can sell, can you send time follow emails with coupons? Can you handle shipping products separately from different suppliers? Can you handle warehousing and storing supplier information? Can you import csv files from your suppliers automatically on schedule? It is the things like that when someone opens a shop, they do not take into account. It is a lot easier to flip a switch in the back office of a program to enable a feature than it is to either program it or try to find a module that does it.
The whole idea of Wordpress is insecure when it comes to ecommerce systems. I mentioned the login above, but it is actually the whole foundation of Wordpress. One thing that you will never catch a dedicated ecommerce system doing is executing a server side language in the template. Wordpress's templates are built around PHP with adds another layer of in security. With Prestashop, a template uses variables that are passed from the controller or the module. That way the internal MVC structure is used to execute all of the code. I can only image how upsetting it must be to someone using Wordpress to find out their site was compromised because they downloaded a mailchimp plugin made by coder dude99 and he didn't sanitize the email input. Everything in an ecommerce system is handled through the controller logic, people aren't willy nilly writing code and executing it.
Speed is also an issue, that comes in with the coding quality standards mentioned above. When you are executing all kinds of code, there could be a bottle neck anywhere. Most ecommerce platforms have built in functions for everything code wise and only allow you to use them. Want to access the database? Sure there is a function for that that checks the data for exploits before it is run. One thing I really like about Prestashop that wordpress does not do is how it handles css and javascript. When a module is developed, it has a directory it needs to be in, inside the module. Prestashop then takes the css and js and compiles it into 2 repective files, cutting down your request number and minifying it in the process. Plus it has default support for things such as APC, MEMcache, and CDN servers.
To answer your question above, yes buying a template might be all you need. It really comes down to how you want your business to operate. There is pretty wide payment gateway support standard, but there are some that are not supported. So you might have to buy a payment module.
If you are building this for a client, I would think twice about taking the job, if you don't have any experience with some of this stuff it can be difficult.
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RE: Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
Nice, I see you are local to Prestashop's office. Are you a member of the Prestashop forum?
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RE: Why does it show (in Moz) that we don't have any meta descriptions on our site when we do?
I personally would make them separate. The reason being is we do not know specifically how all of the crawlers are designed. Some might pick it up, others might not. I would look at it a better safe than sorry type situation.
edit: Sorry for the ninja edits, but I ran a couple of pages through a few crawlers and none picked up the meta description. The itemprop is throwing it off. I would do two different tags, the tradition and the rich ones. The reason being there is a collision in the naming convention and I honestly have no data on what crawlers would support in that sense. From what I have observed, and I could be wrong, but I think google might actually use a different crawler for rich markup. The reason being is that normally I can get pages indexed on the first crawl, but it takes a lot of time for the snippets to get indexed. Either they use a different crawler or some kind of review process.
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RE: Flash Banners in 2014
The end of service life for Flash to be supported on Android devices was Sept 2013, no new versions are to be made and no new devices / Android versions supported. I would personally not use it. Here is a link to the adobe road map, at the bottom it tells the mobile info. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html
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RE: Why does it show (in Moz) that we don't have any meta descriptions on our site when we do?
Can you give the instance of a couple of pages it does not register them on?
edit: After looking at your main page it looks like you are using a combination of rich snippet / meta description. Have you tried adding the meta description in the normal manner?
IE you have
itemprop="description" content="BeTheBoss makes it easy to find the best franchises in Canada. Search our directory for the top Canadian franchise opportunities and businesses for sale." />
Normally it is written
description" content="BeTheBoss makes it easy to find the best franchises in Canada. Search our directory for the top Canadian franchise opportunities and businesses for sale." />
I cannot find any information if search engines will actually accept a meta description with the rich mark up, I would play it safe and do both.
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RE: Order and multiple match when 301 redirect ?
Try putting the privacy redirect first. But yes, the order makes a difference. A htaccess file processes redirects until a match is made, then it stops processing them.
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RE: Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
It is pretty easy to maintain, easier than Magento and cheaper as well. It is also more powerful than the other options you mentioned. As for SEO it is on par with everything else SEO wise, it really comes down to how you structure the site, how SEO optimized the template is and things of that nature. There is a hosting company called Cloudways.com you can sign up for a free account with out having to enter a CC and try Prestashop out, they have an auto installer.
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RE: Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce
Have you considered Prestashop? It is pretty popular also.
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RE: Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
Hmm, I honestly do not know in this situation. One thing you might try is to do a modal that blocks the page with a semi transparent layer, but check if it is googlebot accessing the site and not do a modal.
But honestly, I thought it was a cookies thing being in the EU so I am not an expert in this area.
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RE: Should I Use A Local Hosting Center?
If you want to shoot me an email at [email protected] I took a look at your site, there are other suggestions I would think would be more beneficial than getting a closer host and would pay off greater.
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RE: Should I Use A Local Hosting Center?
Ruben,
It does, but it is to a degree. There are multiple factors to take into consideration with improving speed to help with rankings. The first one is that Google uses some 200 ranking factors, speed from what I have researched is graduated. Like say all sites that load under 2 seconds get a full score, then sites that load 2-5 seconds get a half score, ect. The numbers are just made up, but that is what I have imagined is how things happen.
Also, you have to take into consideration that you might be moving the site geographically further from the location of googles crawling bot, which might make it seem slower for google.
Then there is the point also, that you might convert more because your site seems quicker to local users.
Is the site itself already optimized for speed? What are the normal page load times from something like pingdom?
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RE: Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
Don't block the site totally and it will not matter really. A lot of people in the e-commerce world do it like in this demo, http://warehouse.iqit-commerce.com/selector/?theme=warehouse2 Just a small bar on the bottom of the page. If you wanted to get even more clever, you could geographically target the user and show based on that and exclude bots from seeing it. But I would not suggest blocking the whole page like an adult site does if it is for cookies. If it is an adult site, that needs a full disabling disclaimer, I have no experience in that area.
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RE: Should I Use A Local Hosting Center?
I would shoot geographically close, most cities are not going to find top level data centers in their city and that is really what it comes down to. One thing to keep in mind too, is that just because a company is local it does not mean their data center is local. One that I would recommend is Web Hosting Buzz, they use a tier 3.5 data center in Atlanta. Which is more than likely geographically closer than what you are using. I am guess since you are using Bluehost you are in the Provo data center, which has had a ton of problems in the last couple of years.
One thing I would mention too is I would stay away from hosts that use data centers located in Florida for the reason of hurricanes. I know one big consideration in data center placement is natural disasters, and it would seem more likely down there.
SEO benefits, not really, but you should see a speed increase, assuming you are hosted in Provo.
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RE: Weird Google Analytics tracking question
Thanks to both of you, that was what I was thinking, I just haven't really heard anyone implementing it like that before.
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RE: Premium Content
One thing you can do is add an unavailable after meta tag to the pages. This tells google to drop the pages from the index after a certain day. I don't think it is unhealthy, it is the way a lot of sites work to be honest.
Also for the thin content, you should try to send a 410 status code for people trying to open the page after it is behind the paywall, but at the same time display the login page that tells them what is happening. Google should take note of that.
Here is a video I saw posted yesterday on another question, around the 35 minute mark Matt Cutts address this question.
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RE: Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I think personally older people do not know too much about them. As far as just plain organic search it should be fine. But at the same time I would poll people you know and ask them if they know about .me domains, or even people you would think that could be visitors to your site.
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Weird Google Analytics tracking question
I have a client that has a market place site, where people list goods and sell them, think something like Etsy. Instead of developing a system to show the users page views and things like that, does it sound reasonable to let them enter a Google Analytics property on the pages they list on, then let them monitor through GA? Does anyone see any fatal flaws in this thinking?
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RE: Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
Apart from the SEO, I think it totally depends on your audience as to whether people even adopt your name. That is one big consideration I would take into account. I think people that are not as familiar with computers are not as aware of the "newer" extensions as young people are. I bought a .me extension for a business it seems to be working out pretty well, but it targets a young audience.
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RE: Need to access robots.txt to block tags
If you can install plugins, you should install Yoast's SEO plugin, from there you can edit both files without ftp access. https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/#files
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RE: Robots.txt vs noindex
I think what I am going to say is going to sound like it is going against the grain, but it really isn't. I have noticed in some places if you want an active community, you reward your members. Look at how moz does their forum, they don't really noindex the pages, but once you hit a point they psuedo drop the nofollow off of your profile link (it could be argued whether they really do). But the point is reward your members that are active. I would set up some automatic noindex tag in the header that grabbed the users post numbers. Then you can noindex all of the spammers and have prominent members shown in the search. If it were me that is how I would do it. I have a PA of 49 on my profile in one forum I regular, I have seen the stats, it is regularly an entry page to the forum. Another member has a 64 on a 93 domain, his is used a lot more than mine for entry as well. Think of it this way, if someone is googling my name, the second result is http://screencast.com/t/jIx7a4hcWV Moz's forum. 2nd search results still get a lot of clicks.
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RE: Sitemap issue - Tons of 404 errors
I don't think it would snowball. It should be the end of the issue, as I think google will have found all of the pages it is going to find. You might have some more popup like tags pages and thing like that, but nothing major. I don't know if your webmaster is letting you see the webmaster tools or not, but it has an error date of when it last detected the error. It should look like this, http://screencast.com/t/5a9lpC6o then you can click on the link and pull this window up, http://screencast.com/t/boyAdXGoOLl From there you can see if the links were internal or external that were triggering the 404 pages. It could very well be that external backlinks were triggering them. If they are internal links, to be safe I would search the source of the pages for the links.
Also, Moz's crawler should pick up the 404 errors and let you know if it is still because of links on the site. The 301 redirects will handle the issue if the links were from the old site, but if the links are because of internal links on the new site that are broken, I would find them and fix them with Moz's crawler or Ravens Crawler.
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RE: Sitemap issue - Tons of 404 errors
This one is really difficult to tell what has actually gone wrong. I am thinking there might have been changes to the site once google indexed the site for the first time and the point it is at now. I went to the internet archive and I could not see many of the pages, so I do not really know.
The fix however is to write 301 redirects for all of the pages that are pulling a 404, but there is a page that represents them. It looks like some of the pages might have had a url change and others might have been done away with.
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RE: Sitemap issue - Tons of 404 errors
It is really hard to tell without seeing the errors. Are the pages at the same address as the previous pages? Did you redirect them? Is there something internally wrong that is hard to tell? It would be easier to diagnose if we could the a list of the 404 pages.
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RE: Structured Data dropped suddenly
That is when I am seeing the drop also. I will ask the other people that I have ran across when their drop happened as well, but I am suspecting the same thing.
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RE: Does Rel=canonical affect google shopping feed?
I have not had any issues with my clients. We send the product through with hashes like http://neat42.com/tshirts/1-faded-short-sleeve-tshirts.html#/color-blue and canonical all of the pages without the hash. If you can control the quantty through a url string you will not have any issues.
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RE: Structured Data dropped suddenly
It very well could be, I am getting this on a site that had 120 product snippets, down to 6 now, http://screencast.com/t/iTdj8RLF this on a site with organizational and hentry snippets, http://screencast.com/t/zmk5phI2BW I also read a post on another forum about other peoples products being dropped out as well.
When did yours drop out?
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RE: Page Speed Factors For SEO
When you say external cdn, is it a cdn that you control or a public repository? If you control the cdn and you are just using it to open more channels for the browser download I would recommend setting the link in the header. From there you can set the canonical tag of the resource in the header. Here is a screenshot of the http request of my logo on my site, http://screencast.com/t/rQoiVIo8deZ5 It is getting the file from the cdn, but it is also telling search engines that the canonical location of the file is on my domain. This is something Google has supported for a while now, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html
If you are using a public repository, you do not have control over the header, so I would not worry too much about it.
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RE: Duplicate Home Page
I agree with the rel="canonical" that is the definitive way to solve the issue. The urls are not actually two different urls, they are using a query string. If you put a redirect into place, you might lose the functionality of the query string. Also, GA uses query strings for tracking, so you would also lose any GA tracking you are using on the main site page.
Most people use rel="canonical" to solve this issue. I know when I blog and I link to a site I normally put a query string in the url I link to just to give them an idea of where the traffic is coming from and to make it easier to track.
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RE: Links On Expired Domains
If all of the domains are not expired you can use the disavow tool as well. That should be your first course in a situation like this, especially when someone is trying to extort you of bad links. If you disavow them, google does not penalize you for them and drops them out of your backlink profile.
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RE: Site wide no follow links
opps, I had a total misunderstanding about it, sorry about that.
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RE: Site wide no follow links
I could be wrong, but the way I understand it is that page rank flows from every link on a site, so nofollowing external links would be sculpting the page rank by keeping the link juice internally in the site. Like I said, I could be wrong on it, but that is how I understand it.
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RE: Redirect Search Results to Category Pages
I would suggest doing it. I made a module for some of my clients a while back that essentially turned search results into category pages. It worked out very well for them, one thing I did was exact matches redirected to the real categories, because the way the module was written there would be a url collision. One thing I would keep in mind is that the search results should not differ too much from what the category shows. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should have a disallow rule on your search directory and a canonical on your category pages. That should also settle any duplicate content issues as well.
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RE: Site wide no follow links
Keri,
What I am referring to has actually been one of the reasons for an old algorithm change. People used to do a thing called page rank sculpting where they would no follow certain links on a page to keep some of the page's page rank. Google then changed the way that PR was passed so that if you no followed a link, the other followed links would get more link juice.
From my take on it, I would say it is trying to manipulate page rank artificially, which puts you at risk for a penalty. Look at Moz's site for example, you guys no follow forum links, which is standard. But you don't nofollow every link on the site, which would seem unnatural. The social media links at the bottom of the pages are followed, just about every link generated by a paid employee at Moz is followed. That is how it should be too.
If you browse around the web at other big places that deal with SEO, like Kiss, Raven, and other places like that, they do the same thing. I have a feeling it is because there is a risk of an unnaturally high number of nofollow links.
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RE: Discrepancy between FB PPC and Google Analytics
It could be a myriad of things. One thing I would suggest is using tracking urls that should solve, or at least shed some light on what is happening. You can use them in conjunction with AWStats to see what people are actually coming and try to figure out if it is because of a user agent or even a specific platform they might be using. It could be some facebook web phone app issue or something.
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RE: Site wide no follow links
I would personally stay away from any site wide rules like that. The hard and fast rule that I think google uses is that is a link is no followed, then it is paid. So you are giving the appearance that all of your external links are paid. Depending on how many you have this could raise a red flag about your site and content.
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RE: Multiple H1 tags in Squarespace
I wouldn't buy that answer either. I don't think they have some secret knowledge, or way of doing things with site structure that would be against best practice yet still work. I think the templates are just made poorly and they are trying to make an excuse that some people will believe.
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RE: Multiple H1 tags in Squarespace
I would say it is not good practice. I think of the heading system as a structure system. Like a book or an outline. The h1 tag should be the title that encompasses the whole page. The h2 tags are like the chapters, h3 are sub chapters or strong points inside the chapters and so on.
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RE: Redirect of https:// to http:// without SSL. Possible or not?!
If you use the sll certificate, I would add a canonical url to the site and just direct everything to the ssl site, then you will be ahead of the game when google starts promoting ssl results.
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RE: Redirect of https:// to http:// without SSL. Possible or not?!
One thing to keep in mind, is that google has said soon they are going to favor secure results over non secure ones. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/14/google-may-push-sites-to-use-encryption/
Also, if you are paying $100 a year for having an ssl, you are paying too much. You can get a certificate at namecheap for like $8 or so and a dedicated ip address is usually like $24.
But to directly answer your question, ask you host to make sure port 443 is open on the server. If it is not open, the request will die before the htaccess has a chance to handle the request. Also, I would recommend adding a canonical url to the site as well.
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RE: How to contact others for sharing my content ?
This is one of the best things I have come across, http://moz.com/blog/what-separates-a-good-outreach-email-from-a-great-one-whiteboard-friday I have used this way to outreach to loads of people with great results.
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RE: Mircodata markup container in body of page
I am pretty sure you are doing it wrong. Can you link me? The markup should all be hidden normally, it is used as a way to describe elements that are on the page already, not for adding new elements.
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RE: Seo site architecture - how deep?
The best rule of thumb is go only as deep as you need to go. If you try to go to deep, you will risk pages with duplicate content and thin content.
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RE: Blog comments - backlinks - question
I totally disagree that forum posts are bad. What is the point of SEO? To drive people to your site. Well done forum posts do just that. I post to a lot of forums, so far this month I have around 7k visits to my blog from forums. Maybe they do not hold any "SEO" weight, but the do the exact same thing that SEO does.
The biggest thing I would suggest with forum posting is to not be spammy. Be helpful, write content that is relevant to questions, and post a lot.