Number of visitors and popularity of the forum
Links from highly visited and popular websites are simply more valuable and trustworthy in the eyes of Google. A good benchmark would be 30K visitors/monthly or above. This is the subject to several exceptions, as there are plenty of small but friendly communities.
Forum Crowd marketing is not only about backlinks, but it is also about bringing traffic to your website.
Relevance to your niche
Remember, not all backlinks are created equal. There are four different kinds of relevance (with regard to quality of the backlink) and they pass a different amount of ranking juice to your website.
- A common thread on a common forum – those include useless threads where people greet each other
- Thematic thread on a common forum – already better, as at least the thread corresponds to your target niche, but not an entire website
- Thematic thread on a niche-relevant forum – That’s what we’re looking for, the entire website is related to your niche
- Regional forum (for local businesses) – This one goes a step further than the last one, yet it is harder to achieve
“Freshness” of the forum thread
Not the backbone of an entire crowd marketing strategy, but still an important concern, that should not be neglected. If the thread is fresh and trendy – that plays well, both for the target audience and for Google.
The content of the forum reply
Goes without saying, the worst you can do is throw a bare backlink with no surrounding text. There should always be a natural-looking and well-written comment preceding the link to your website.
The backlink should not be hidden and your comment should be a part of the discussion.
Dofollow vs Nofollow
Nofollow links can still be useful, but make sure that not all of your backlinks are nofollow, as that wouldn’t improve your ranking. We aim for a natural mix of nofollow and dofollow links (50/50).
All dofollow links very suspicious to Google and nofollow links are still links, which means people will click on them visit your website
Google will use nofollow attribute (along with “ugc” and “sponsored”) as hints, meaning that they may still be indexed upon Google’s discretion.
- “ugc” (user-generated content), which usually means that a link is a comment, posted on a forum or blog.
- the “sponsored” attribute is meant to clearly show Google that a certain link was paid