The old forum link building playbook goes like this: create profiles on 500 forums, drop your link in every thread, collect hundreds of backlinks.
That playbook is dead. Has been dead since Penguin. Anyone still running it is wasting their time or actively hurting their site.
But dismissing forums entirely misses the actual opportunity.
Communities — Reddit, Quora, niche forums, Slack groups — can be genuinely valuable for link building. Just not in the way most SEOs think.
Most forum links are nofollow.
Reddit uses nofollow attributes on all outbound links. Quora uses nofollow. Most niche forums use nofollow on external links in posts and comments. The standard approach of dropping your URL in forum threads passes zero PageRank.
This is not a workaround or an exception. It is by design. Forum platforms made this choice specifically to prevent link spam from polluting their platforms.
So if you are asking "can I build 100 forum links and improve my rankings?" — no. Not from a direct PageRank perspective.
The opportunity is different. And understanding it is what separates the tactics that work from the ones that waste your time.
The forum strategy that delivers real SEO value looks nothing like dropping links.
It looks like this:
This is a longer game. It is not a tactic you execute in a spreadsheet and track by link count. It is brand building that generates link-earning opportunities.
Reddit is simultaneously one of the most spammed and one of the most link-valuable platforms on the internet.
The contradiction is explained by this: the spam gets deleted and earns nothing, while genuine contributions in high-authority subreddits earn significant secondary citations.
The numbers:
What this looks like in practice: You publish an original analysis of something in your industry — a dataset, a trend observation, a benchmark. You share it in the most relevant subreddit with a genuine summary of the findings and a link to the full data on your site.
If it is interesting enough, it gets upvoted. Journalists covering your industry see it. Some of them write articles that cite your analysis and link to your site.
Those editorial links are earned because your Reddit post drove visibility for your original content. Reddit was the distribution channel. Your content was the asset.
What does not work:
Subreddit moderators are fast and ruthless. Spam accounts get banned within hours. And even if your link survives, it is nofollow and passes nothing.
Quora is a different animal.
It is a Q&A platform where questions get indexed by Google and often rank for long-tail queries. A well-written answer to a question that ranks on page one of Google can drive meaningful referral traffic to your site.
Links in Quora answers are nofollow. They do not pass PageRank directly.
But there are two reasons Quora can still contribute to your link building strategy:
1. Referral traffic from ranking answers If your answer to "What is the best way to build backlinks for a new website?" ranks on Google and you include a link to a detailed guide on your site, real people click that link. Some of them have blogs. Some write articles. Some are journalists. The referral traffic creates secondary link-earning opportunities.
2. Topical authority signal There is ongoing debate in the SEO community about whether consistent, high-quality Quora presence contributes to topical authority signals. The consensus is that it is a weak signal at best. But combined with other signals, it is not zero.
The Quora strategy that makes sense: answer genuinely, at length, for questions in your niche where you have real expertise. Include links to your content only when they are the most useful resource for the reader. Do not answer with short replies and a promotional link.
Industry-specific forums often have relatively low DR. A niche marketing forum might be DR 30. A specific software developer community might be DR 25.
But these links carry something that high-DR general sites do not: hyper-specific topical relevance.
A dofollow link from the most respected forum in your specific industry niche — even at DR 25 — can carry more ranking signal for industry-specific keywords than a nofollow mention on a DR 70 general tech blog.
This is rare. Most niche forums use nofollow for external links. But some do not, especially older community platforms and industry association forums that pre-date the modern nofollow convention.
How to find niche forums worth engaging:
If you find a niche forum with active discussion and followed external links in genuinely valuable posts, participate there consistently. Build reputation first. Links come later, if at all.
Slack groups and Discord servers are not indexed by Google. Links you share in these communities do not directly build your backlink profile.
But they are where professionals in specific niches spend time. Including journalists, bloggers, and content marketers.
Sharing your original content in relevant Slack groups — groups you are actually active in, not spam groups — gets your work in front of people who write things on the open web. Those people can cite your work in their own articles.
The link pathway: Slack post → blogger reads your content → blogger writes an article → blogger links to your content.
No direct link from the Slack post. Indirect link from the article the blogger later writes.
This is a long game. But it is how community presence translates into editorial links over time.
Automated forum profile links Tools that create thousands of forum profiles with your URL in the bio are still being sold. They are still worthless and still detectable. Do not use them.
Comment spam Posting "Great article! Check out my site at [URL]" in blog comments and forum threads is the oldest form of link spam. Moderators delete it. Google ignores the ones that survive. It wastes time.
Paid link placements in forums Some forum operators offer to pin your post or include your link in their FAQ section for payment. This is paid link buying in a forum context. The same risks apply as with paid link insertions anywhere else.
Creating multiple accounts Do not create fake accounts to upvote your content or make your views appear more widespread than they are. Communities and platforms detect this. Bans and content deletion follow.
Here is the framing that makes forum strategy sensible:
Do not think of it as link building. Think of it as distribution.
Forums, Reddit, Quora, and Slack communities are places where your target audience spends time. Getting your content and your name in front of that audience — consistently, with genuine value — creates the conditions for organic link earning.
You are not collecting forum links. You are building the reputation that causes other people to link to you.
That is fundamentally different from a link acquisition campaign. It is slower. It is harder to measure in a spreadsheet. But the links it generates are the best kind: entirely organic editorial links from people who genuinely found your work valuable.
This is how we think about community presence in the context of broader link building techniques — as a support layer for content distribution, not a core link acquisition method.
We treat forum and community presence as a supporting tactic for content distribution, not a core link building method.
When we produce original research or a genuinely valuable resource for a client, we distribute it in relevant communities as part of the launch strategy. The goal is to get it in front of the people who write about this topic — not to collect forum links.
The links come from the secondary coverage. The community is the distribution channel.
For clients with strong personal brands — founders, industry experts, public-facing executives — community presence also supports podcast link building and expert citation strategies. Being known in the right communities means journalists find you when they are looking for sources.
Forum links are mostly nofollow and mostly pass no direct PageRank.
Spam posting in forums is a waste of time at best and a spam signal at worst.
Genuine, consistent community participation creates the reputation and visibility that earns real editorial links — from articles, publications, and journalists who found your work through the community.
One approach earns you nothing. The other is part of a sustainable, long-term link building strategy.
We build links that actually move rankings — editorial, contextual, and earned through real outreach and real content.
Talk to us about what a modern link building strategy looks like for your business.