Forums that have the dofollow attribute set have always been a target for link builders. This practice is often frowned upon by forum owners as far too many individuals who attempt promotion in this way go about it like a bull in a china shop. They will sign up, load their signature with links then spray around a half dozen worthless posts (“I like it here, great forums!” or “Me is liking your postings very much” etc.) in the space of 5 minutes, never again to return to the forum to learn they have been banned before the ink dried on their posts and their efforts were a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time. Many times these attempts will be scripted/automated which, for the forum admins, often makes them more obvious to spot and kill.
Often forum admins are on the lookout for sign link spammers and deal with them mercilessly. However, they might not be so keenly aware of the blog feed feature that many forums offer.
Searching Google for the phrase:
[your_niche] "Recent blog:" inurl:showthread
and replace [your_niche] with the niche you are looking to promote within. So if you are promoting a cellphone based blog you’d use:
cellphone "Recent blog:" inurl:showthread
and get a selection of vBulletin forums that allow RSS feeds in posts.
However, many of these forums might have the rel=”nofollow” attribute set. If you are looking for link weight from your promotional efforts (as opposed to a trickle of traffic) then you will need to locate forums that are “dofollow”.
The DoFollow Forums Search Engine allows you to search within a data set of dofollow forums and significantly eases the hunt for dofollow links in the context of forums. Simply enter your niche coupled with “Recent blog:” in the search field and you should get back a list of forums that are dofollow and allow you to pull in your most recent blog posts via RSS feeds.
As with all forum based promotion, refrain from practices that might get you labelled a spammer (and your account deleted.) Participate in the forum before including your links. Make a few original, valuable posts, even as many as 15 or 20 before including your links in either your signature or RSS feed. It can make a lot of difference in the long run as to whether you pick up a broad selection of good inbound links from forums, or just waste your time as the forum admins catch up with you.