I just have to point out something that I thought was obvious.

Posting keyword-rich links to your website within the forum area of this website won't help you with SEO. That's because the links you post in this forum will not appear to search engines. There is a "switcheroo" in place. For instance, view the source code for this page and see if you can find any of the hyperlinks listed in this forum thread. You can't do it. All you will see is spam links for artificial ranking manipulation. So all of those keyword-rich links under your signature do you little good.

I hate be the one to rain on peoples' parades ... but let the truth be known.

-Brandon

You are incorrect Brandon. The links are spidered and do count.

These forums run in a frame because it was a necessity with the previous version of the forum software. You were looking at the frame source - not the page source.

To see the page source you need to right click on the page and choose "view source" from the menu.

Exactly my point. Why does this website use frames? Out of necessity, or so they can feed search engines "invisible" content within frame areas that users do not see.

Don't get me wrong. This forum can be marginally helpful to people. But some people think their keyword-rich links are doing them some good. And I can tell you that a link from this forum provides little to no SEO value.

So use the forum because you like to exchange ideas, not because you think you're getting SEO value from it. That would simply be a waste of time.

I don't need to argue about it. People can read the various points of view and decide for themselves.

Brandon, your post is off topic and has nothing to do with this thread. Since you seem intent pursuing this I will respond before I close this thread.

The forum runs in frames because for the first 8 years of its existence the software used was a cgi script - which is not indexed by search engines. Frames were a necessity in order to have the forum listed and ranked well in search engines.

It worked - the forum has been #1 or #2 in most search engines for "real estate forums" for its entire 9 year history. Most who are knowledgeable in SEO know that when something is working you leave it alone - which is what we have done.

As for your allegation that links from this forum have no SEO value - you are incorrect once again. If you check Google - site:http://www.agentsonline.net/forums/ - you will see that over 21,000 forum pages are listed. Unlike many other forums we do not use "no follow" - all of the links count and unlike other forums who may show more forum pages listed in Google- ours are not in duplicate and triplicate.

By the way, if you search old posts you will find that you are not the first to have raised this issue - it was been flogged to death by many SEOs who do not understand that using frames does not hurt rankings if used correctly.