Just a general question to the community. When I first came to WHT and setup my profile, I also included a signature with my domain, etc. to appear at the bottom of the posts. Right after I posted a couple of time, I began getting more visitors but also an increase in the amount of spam I got. So, about six months ago, I removed the signature line and the spam level has stayed about the same or decreased slightly.

Is there any real advantage to a signature line vs a post without a signature line? I am not looking to gain any clients from the WHT community and generally service only my region of the state.

Any feedback appreciated.

It depends, most signatures are for drawing attention to your site. Although, some just have your name in them, perhaps a cool nifty difty little catch phrase. It's an advantage if you want people to know who you are or perhaps go to your site. If not, then there's no real point IMHO.

Yeah, I notice the spams... :)

But I don't mind it either, most of it automatically sent to the junk. I also get a few customers from here. So, I think it kind of balancing things.

Pity you cannot place a graphic as your sig - which would cure the problem!

JR

You could just put something like

MyCompanyName.com - Serving the south-southwest part of my state since 1998

Just don't have the web address link to your website with the URL tag. Then crawlers won't go to your site from here. It should accomplish what you want without much hassle.

Pity you cannot place a graphic as your sig - which would cure the problem!
And cause a lot more really... The forum would appear cheeky and messy.

Just don't have the web address link to your website with the URL tag. Then crawlers won't go to your site from here.

IIRC (and, I may be wrong), bots will not pull up the signatures when crawling WHT, so there is no issue there at all ;).


Pity you cannot place a graphic as your sig - which would cure the problem!

Not to mention causing numerous moderation problems, and more issues to boot. Not a good idea on WHT ;)

Bots won't pull up sigs when getting archived posts, but google for one crawls WHT enough to get posts before they are archived and does include the sigs.