Nickel pointed out that the links in user sigs are set to "nofollow", which is a fancy way of saying that search engine spiders don't count them in their indexing. This wasn't a conscious decision on my part. It's something that phpBB is doing by default. I'd like for users to be able to get something for contributing here.

Unfortunately, I can't find the template where this occurs. If any of you are familiar with phpBB and can tell me how to fix this, I would appreciate it.

I know next to nothing about phpBB but I found a site with a mod that does something similar: http://techpatterns.com/forums/about633.html

I just did a google search on "phpbb signature nofollow". Quite a few of the top hits were related to why phpbb is set up this way (and most other forum software as well).

Part of it is to discourage spam. Bots make forum ID's and profile pages with links in them back to their own sites, and spam postings that have signature links to those sites, etc.

The second reason is that it skews search engine results for google, yahoo, mslive, etc. Since their systems are designed to weight backlinks to a website higher than no links back to a website, having many links to something simply because of a lot of forum posts by the same person would skew those results unfairly (and this would similarly happen with signature spam bots). Using 'nofollow' on a link still lets a search engine bot go through it, but doesn't weight that site up. In the end, this has another effect: regular links in the thread ARE weighted up, by the reasoning that conscious posts by a member are likely to be more valuable than something that is auto-generated in a signature in every post.

However, based on some forum posts that the google search gave me, phpbb might not even be weighting any regular links up either, which is even worse.

After reading those same articles, plus a few more on the other side of the fence, I believe that the "nofollow" attribute was created for that sole purpose. However, it has done an abysmal job deterring comment spam.

While it's true that some will try to abuse the system, I think it's fair to say that there's enough moderation at GRS to detect and halt any such attempts where users comment solely to increase the site-ranking.

Just my 2c.

I know these boards just got setup but you should check out simple machine forums. I use them on a number of different sites and they're much more secure, current, and receive less spam than phpbb. You can also move your phpbb board to SMF. Oh, and they're free too. Install takes maybe less than 15 minutes.

http://www.simplemachines.org/