(sorry for cross-posting: this is at SEO News as well because I really want all the input I can get – want to understand this)
After having said what I said about the text links on signatures on FORUM POSTS, now I want to comment on the misterious issue of text links on signatures on BLOGS.
I have one blog that I feed about three times a week, I have quite an interesting traffic considering that the articles are somewhat long and concerning philosophical and political issues on strength sports (not all that popular, right?). Readers like the content. It is located at www.livejournal.com , a Linux based host. I signed all my posts with the site link on my signature (www.bodystuff.org) and it never showed up at Google as an inbound link. So I discovered there was this no-followup tag to the code and that was that.
Recently, they changed the options for the layout and I changed my settings. Then links from the blog started showing up at Google as inbound links! However - weird, very weird... - I have more than 60 posts over there and only two or three show up as links!
Isn't that absolutely misterious??

Not really. Since Google doesn't report every link it finds I'd say that is to be expected.