Paintbrush read the article again, and imagine you are a spammer , I know thats difficult, but try

HMMMMMMMMM tick tick tick tick tick tick now i think its telling you how to look legitimate, so you can get away with it

Or is it me thats got it totally wrong which is very likely

The bots/people that insert these posts aren't going to take the time to find out what a forum is about and write something relevant. They just plop the same cr@p into any forum they can worm their way into, and it always stands out like over-cooked spam

But, there are many newbie website owners who truly don't know any better (like one of my clients who wanted white text on a white background to get some more keyword phrases in without cluttering up the page with all that text ). Maybe somebody might learn something about a common SEO/forum no-no

I wonder how many people actually know why its called Spam

As a life long Monty Python fan it has amused me ever since the first time i cam across the term.

So il just settle for the egg chips and spam without the egg and they can post away and not a frying pan in sight !

The article definitely tells you how to do it right. And now with a link in this forum it's rating just jumped 50 places.

Awe man!!! I got here too late for even the leftovers I LOVE the SMELL of SPAM in the morning.

Why is that we are considered Blog commenting ad forum posting spam? There are good ways to build links even in the same genre of the blog commenting and forum posting. you can engage yourself in genuine activity, e.g I use to wander across the SEO blog, and I use to comment every time I feel like saying something. And then, while commenting, If there is a place for website addition, why I shouldn't add my site there? There is no reason why one should not add link to his blog post.

Similarly, if I am in a forum for example(I have comparatively little activity in forums), and I am doing good activity there, then I think I deserve to be place in the link in signature or may be the post if its a proper match for the content. So what I am trying to say is that not everything is Spam, its just how you look at it. if you run a blackhat software to do 3000 forum posts for u in single day that can be considered as spam, but manually taking part in forums and blogs is white hat and should not be mixed with bad things.

Because this particular forum is for trial users of Coffeecup software who need help or advice from regular Coffeecup users.

So there is no need for a trial user to have a signature, though they are welcome to have one, CC just request that all users do not place links to non CC designed websites unless they are relevant to the question being asked !

Here's a relevant link example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

The other part of that is that many people come to the forums "manually" and sign up and post some gibberish stuff just so they can place links to their sites in it. That's spam no matter how you slice it. Viv already touched on the reasons this forum is here, and to be honest the users that are trial users or people thinking about using CC software should be grateful there's a forum to post in for them. These forums are one of the most active and helpful forums you'll find, what our users "don't" need is having to wade through a myriad of advertisements placed by "seemingly" well intentioned posters.

Make sense now?

When someone goes completely off-topic to say look at all my sites (none of which were created with CC products), that's spam.
Also, there are plenty of discussions about SEO in the forums. A non-spammer might have searched for info first, rather than just dropping a list of site links into a non-related thread.

Or to put that another way CC USERS have websites in their signatures made with CC SOFTWARE purely as examples to be referenced when new users ask questions.

And furthermore they appear in search results bringing NEW CUSTOMERS to CC who may have never heard of them.