I have a new stock discussion forum and I would like to promote it. Specifically, I have two ideas in mind to help promote it:
1) Become a member at other stock discussion forums. Make high quality posts, build a good reputation, and leave a link to my own forum in a non intrusive way (ie. in signature or at the end of my posts). This approach makes sense because you can find other members in other forums that are interested in stock discussion and a backlink to your forum, as long as it is not done in an intrusive/spammy way, should come across as acceptable.
2) Promote my site by writing articles at Squidoo, Hubpages, etc. This approach also makes sense because that's what Squidoo and Hubpages is for.
The problem with both these approaches is that when I leave a backlink to my site, the page that I am leaving a backlink from may have a low PR - most likely, a PR of 0. Now, I have read that after the Penguin update by Google, your site can be penalized if you have too many backlinks from low PR pages:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224339
So, I am caught in a dilemma:
a) If I start promoting my site via other stock forums, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc, but the backlink to my site comes from a page with low PR, Google may penalize my site.
b) However, if I don't promote my site, nobody will ever discover it (aside from other promotion techniques like social media promotion, directories, etc).
