Crowd Marketing. Benefits or useless expenses
To begin with, you need to understand what crowd marketing is. Crowd marketing is about attracting the attention of your target audience by posting referral comments on forums such as forum posting sites in usa, blogs, and other places where people communicate. With its help, you can form a positive field around the company, give naturalness to the reference profile, increase the reach of the audience. Now let's look at what links are and what benefits they provide.
Mentions
The most important result of forum promotion and commenting on the thematic sites is a reference in the form of non-clickable URL. As you know, inactive links moderators forums remove much less often, and they look more natural.
John Mueller, a search quality expert at Google, discussed the usefulness of mentions at an online conference. He said that the search engine algorithm "sees" page addresses in the text that are not marked up as links and uses them to discover new content. In other words, mentions help Google find and index pages faster. Muller says mentions are not used for ranking.
Nofollow links
Another result you can get from crowd marketing tools is "closed" links (links with rel="nofollow" attribute). To date, among optimizers there is no consensus on whether such links contribute to the promotion of the site. On the one hand, it is believed that they make the link mass is more natural, which is especially important when buying links.
Thus, "closed" links, as well as mentions, are certainly useful for speeding up the indexing of content. There is also the possibility that to some extent they have a positive effect on the ranking of the site and form a natural link profile of the domain.
Open links
In fairly rare cases it is possible to place full-fledged "open" links on the forums. Sometimes this has to meet certain requirements: to gain the right rating, to have an "age" profile or just to pass the test of the moderator, who, of course, is not interested in advertising at their own expense. But if you place links from thematic forums succeeded, it can be considered a serious success, because even if they did not succeed to make anchors, they are as natural and "live", because they go to a real user. Perhaps even potential customers.
"Open" links from forums increases the naturalness of the link mass, which again, is especially important in the mass purchase of links. Thus, "open" links from quality, visited, thematic forums is very useful for promoting a web resource. But to chase such links at all costs, without looking at the quality of the site, the idea is not too good.