‘Link Farm’ What It Is and How You Can Identify It?

Tagged with: link farm, pagerank, SEO

Thursday, August 14, 2008, 23:01

This news item was posted in Link Building category and has 5 Comments so far.

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One of the most common mistakes that webmasters and bloggers make is linking to link farms is due to lack of knowledge about what a link farm is and how to detect one. Adding a link to link farm on your website or blog can cost you a lot and thus you always have to be careful about which websites you link to. But what exactly is a link farm and how in the world can you detect one?

What is a link farm?
Link farms are websites that have tons of inbound links to increase their search rankings and PageRank. Such sites contain lots of links to unrelated websites. Sometimes there are also networks of link farm sites that link to each other.

Search engines are very strict to link farms. Most of them ban such sites completely from being indexed and displayed in search results. Furthermore, they will also lose their pagerank if they get banned by Google.

But that’s not the worse part! Who cares if link farms get banned? The problem is that if your site links to link farms then it can get banned too or at least lose its PageRank! Yup that’s right and that is why it is extremely important that you know what a link farm is and know how to properly identify one so that you do not link your website to it.

How to identify a link farm?
If you have not been serious about the sites that you link to then you really need to start doing so because they can have a great impact on your site’s ranking. You must always review the site closely before adding a link to it. Here are some tips to help you identify a link farm:

Site has lots of links - If you go to a site and see that it has tons and tons of links then you should immediately understand that it is a link farm.
Low PageRank - Usually link farms get penalized by Google and thus lose their pagerank. Thus, you should be careful when you link to sites with PR 0. I am not saying that PR 0 sites are link farms but there is a higher possibility.
Little or no content - Owners of link farms do not care about content. All they want is inbound links to increase ranking. Thus, don’t link to a site if you don’t find much content on the site.
Poorly maintained - Link farm webmasters don’t manage their sites very well. As mentioned earlier, links matter most to them and thus they don’t spend much time organizing their sites.

Also remember that if a site seems like a link farm but has a good PageRank, then you should probably not link to it. Maybe the site just turned into a link farm and might lose its PageRank completely in the next update and also hurt your website’s PageRank.

Remember, you never want your website to be linked to a bad neighborhood just like you don’t want your kid to be playing in a bad neighborhood!

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5 Responses to “‘Link Farm’ What It Is and How You Can Identify It?”

Linkdor Directory said on Sunday, August 24, 2008, 16:51

Hi,
could you give us some examples of what a link farm is in reality. Very often people think that a link farm equals web directory, which is not true.
Regards
Myspace Proxy said on Sunday, August 24, 2008, 18:56

Hello,

I had the same problem when launching my site, however I read an ebook somewhere and noticed that it was a problem so I fixed it.
Erick said on Sunday, August 24, 2008, 19:10

I purchased a backlink from one such farm when I didn’t know better and the site got banned from Google.
Any site can be a link farm if it has more than 100 outgoing links in a page and no real content.
SEO Guru said on Monday, August 25, 2008, 0:41

This is a good example of a link farm pagehole.com ZERO content all links. I’ve had a link on there for over a year and to this day Google still does’t count it as a backlink. Actually there are a good amount of decent directories you can submit to and get a quality backlink.

When submitting to directories do your homework look and see if the page you are submitting to has been cached or has PR, How many links are on the page (if more then 30 I would pass) Does the page have good content are a bunch of garbage.
Pete said on Wednesday, September 10, 2008, 12:45

A webmaster should watch out where they link to. If there is little real content at a target site, such as a link farm, he/she should step back and think about why the link to there was made in the first place.