The Skinny On Link Farms

Have you ever seen a large farm from the air? From a few thousand feet up, farms look like orderly divisions of land. Each little square looks perfectly proportioned and perfectly laid out.

That’s exactly how link farms look. If you’ve ever landed on a page with links ordered neatly around the page, and with little or no text explaining all of the various links, then you’ve landed on a link farm. That’s all they are, too — collections of links that lead to other web sites, or sometimes off to other link farms.

You’ll hear this term often in SEO because link farms are not a good strategy for improving your search engine rankings. Search engines don’t like link farms, because they offer no information that’s of any value to the people who perform searches. And for that reason, link farms are usually delisted as soon as they’re discovered.

It’s easy for you to get pulled into a link farm, thinking it’s a legitimate link to your site. You’ll usually receive some type of solicitation for you to place a link to one of these sites in return for a link to your site; it’s even possible that you’ll hear of an SEO firm that uses link farms in an attempt to artificially produce results that help them to charge you more.

That’s why it’s wise to check closely the places where your links will be placed. If you receive a request for a reciprocal link, be sure you check to make sure that the page that will be displaying your link actually is a relevant web page that has some association with the topic of your page. If you check it out and find that what you’re just being added to a collection of links on a page, many of which are unrelated, don’t allow your link to be displayed there.

You may not be the person who created the link farm, but your site can be delisted just as fast as the link farm can. All they care is that someone is spamming the crawler, trying to make it believe something that’s not true.

Knowing what constitutes a link farm is easy. In addition to the site characteristics that have already been mentioned, there are some other indicators that a site might not be legitimate. And it’s your responsibility to ensure that the pages with which your site is linked are real pages, designed for site visitors, not for crawlers.

• Link farms have no connection at all to your site, either in topic or in actual relation to the content that’s on your site.

• Link farms have long, complex URLs and links are often stored in deep directories so that it’s harder for search engine crawlers to find them.

• Link farms will usually accept any link that is sent to them, so it’s not unusual for links to be unrelated. If someone wants to add your link to a site that isn’t even close to yours, don’t accept.

• Link farm owners will sometimes send you an e-mail stating they have linked to you and would like a link to their page in return. Again, be cautious of whom you link to or whom you allow to link back to you.

So you see, there are some key characteristics that most link farms have in common, if you come across any of the above tactics, its highly probable that its some how related to a link farm. Steer well clear, move on and focus on building quality incoming links, links which will really count towards your SEO efforts.

For more information on this topic of attracting and searching out inbound links, and for help with spotting dodgy link trading tactics, checkout my post, Use Caution With Link Trading Strategies.