The Official Internet Marketing Sweetie Blog

Wednesday, August 4, 2004

What is a Link Farm Anyway?

It's one of those things that webmasters are told to avoid...but what are they REALLY? I've written some information on What is a Link Farm & Why You Should Avoid Them" and here is an excerpt:

"A link farm is when group of website owners get together to link to each other. One main links page is created with links to all the participant's websites and each participant places that links page on her website. Voila! Instant links to your website.

Now whether or not your purpose is just to help promote one another as opposed to boosting search engine rankings...you still run the risk of being punished or banned by search engines. Search engines cannot understand motive and this could be seen as an "illegal" link popularity scheme."

It's as simple as that. Unfortunately, many people don't really understand this concept and are lead to believe that certain linking practices are above-the-board, when in fact they are link farms. If you participate in a program where you place code on your site that links to other members in the linking group and in return all those people link to you...you are participating in a link farm

If you need tips on how to get QUALITY incoming links to your site, check out this article:
Planning a Link Building Strategy

I welcome questions: If you aren't sure if the program you are involved with is a link farm, post your comments here.

2 Comments:

Blogger Anita said...

Obviously there seems to be a lot of confusion about this. Thanks for helping set the records straight. I'm sure there's a lot of good thoughts behind some link farms but unfortunately Google doesn't hand pick anything.

4:59 PM  
Blogger Alice said...

Yep, I know. Unfortunately, search engines don't see "motive". I've been made aware of a few other types of situations and it's frustrating, but you gotta adapt.

If it's between my receiving a few hits from an exchange program or thousands of visitors every week...I think I'll take the thousands of visitors.

11:57 PM  

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