Are Profile Backlink Services Safe and Useful?

Yeah back in 2004! I remember when you could build 100k forum profile links overnight and outrank your competitor over night. It doesn't happen anymore. These sorts of links are very low quality links and Google has done a lot to not make them count any more. But there are different types of profile links. There are the low quality profile links from places like forums, where those forums might not even be related to your site in anyway. Those are really bad and will likely damage your rankings. And then there's the high authority profile links on big sites high authority sites like Diigo, About.me, Authorstream, Ted, Scribd etc etc. Those aren't too bad to have because those are high authority sites. But building 10 million profile links to your site from low quality forums is where the problem lies.

But not all forum profile links are bad. The ones that would be valuable would be from forums that are in your niche. So if you have a blog about gardening, then you could have a bunch of profile links from gardening forums and that wouldn't be too bad. But you wouldn't want just these only. You'd still need other types of links to your site from other places too and even if they were all from related forums you'd still not want just these links only as that would look spammy and not be a healthy link portfolio to have. It's all about diversity today and have a wide and diverse backlink portfolio.

In that SEO link list you purchased from me, you can find lists of high authority sites to build profiles on. I believe there is about 300+ of them that I had pooled together by searching out all the sites that have high authority sites for link building purposes, removing all the duplicates and that's the best of the best. Have you put it to use at all yet Lynne?

Hi Mike, Oh dear no! I have had a good look at the list and I have visited a number of the websites you mentioned but I have not started building any of my own links yet. I will do so!

So tell me, having profile links in the right niche can be beneficial right? But surely you would need to actually be active on the forum a bit or does that not matter, is it just registering and creating your profile enough?

Yes I understand that link diversity is important so I wouldn't focus just on one type. I asked this question because the impression i got is that profile backlinks are low quality. I just wanted to see what everyone here says about these types of links.

Well if you're registering to forums in your niche, it would make sense to interact on those forums so that your signature link that's in your sig is shown up in more places on that forum. That could be in really old threads that Google is already ranking for things and/or in new threads too that can rank in time. Plus of course, people could visit your link in your sig from the posts/replies etc that you make on it. Also so that when the Admin decide to do a purge and remove all accounts with no posts, your profile remains. Plus it's a credibility thing as well. You wouldn't want someone to see that you have a forum profile link but the profile itself has no posts on that forum. That would be glaringly obvious why you created it then. But if you had a lot of posts on that forum, it would see you as a valuable asset to that forum and that would make your profile even stronger in time as well (all those posts linking to your profile where you link is).

Yes for sure, and that just goes to show why a Virtual Assistant might be the way to go here. I just don't have the time to go and be active on forums

I barely have enough time to write my content for my websites and do some bare basics marketing.

Profile backlinks? Profiles on forums you mean? Well that's a dead SEO practice, some people still offer such services and some SEOs still think they can help.
In my opinion profile backlinks are not compatible with modern SEO techniques.