I've been noticing people's signature links at the major SEO forums more and more lately, especially when I ran this search - mesothelioma seo forum thread reply. That's a disturbing number of results and scanning through the first few pages, it looks like a lot of people are outing their clients (or their own sites) with a much higher risk than reward.

I often imagine myself as a search engineer or as a competing SEO for my sites or those of my clients. In both cases, it's far too easy to identify the SEO behind the site, and thus gain (in the case of a competitor) a great advantage or (in the case of a search engineer) to apply some nasty manual penalties. The good side is that a few folks from the forum might be interested enough to click the link and see your page, but it's probably not very topically focused towards SEO, so CTR and conversion is going to be horribly low. It's also my opinion that any link from forums like Cre8, SEOChat, SEW or WebProWorld is going to be viewed very, very skeptically by the major SEs. I'm not conspiracy-theory minded enough to say it could hurt you, but it certainly isn't boosting your ranking for anything competitive.

It seems to me that a lot of relatively intelligent and otherwise worldly SEOs are making a particularly uwise move in posting their URLs and targeted kws for the world to see. I'd urge anyone who is to reconsider - forum signatures should target the forum readers; link popularity is not the goal.