101 Articles Links Farms
LINK FARMS
There are various definitions of link farm. Basically links farms are a hub of interconnected websites / web pages which are used to increase the PageRank of the interconnected web pages and increase the link popularity of all the links connected with each other. Almost all the methods of link farming are meant to manipulate the search engine results.Some methods of link farm SPAM.
1. A website owner might have 100 different websites and he doesn't have the time and resources to make each and every site popular, so he decides to cross link all those web sites with each other with the intension of increasing the link popularity of those websites. This is a typical link farm. We can see a big bunch links on the side menu or on the footer, all linking to different websites. If you research more by looking at the WHOIS or the link patterns you will see that all of those domains are owned / operated by the same individual. This is pure laziness and will only result in getting the entire cross linked sites penalized.
2. SEO companies and link farms: Well it's very common; someone in SEO industry will own many websites. But there are some unethical SEO companies that own lot of domains and cross link them, to boost their PageRank and link popularity and they want that link power to be transferred to their client websites or their own websites. Many companies were caught by Google's manual review or by automated detection and got their sites penalized.
3. Blog link farms:Very common now and before. People use the power of blogs to spread link popularity among themselves or to other websites. There are many bloggers like free linking and what they do is, they will crosslink 100s of blogs that different individuals operate to increase the link popularity. Sometimes bloggers do this unintentionally but most of the time it is intentional.
4. Automated link farms: This is something that link brokers use, they have code that will directly post a bunch of text links on the publisher's website and they do this across 100s of 1000s of WebPages which becomes one huge link farm.
5. Link exchange / 3-way link farms: 3 way link farms are common these days, you sit in your house, you get out of blue a link request and the person says he will add your link on another website and you link to his website. You can notice 50 to 100 links on the site from which he is willing to provide a link to you. Basically the sites that hold the links are just big link farms, which get their PageRank or link popularity from other cross linked websites.
A nice quote from searchengineguide.com about link farm
"The page looks like a farmer's field with nicely arranged rows of links to hundreds of sites which aren't necessarily organized in any logical manner, but that doesn't matter because someone told them the link is all that counts"
Best way to avoid link farms is to build links in a more natural way; allow users to appreciate your website, Write quality content, participate in social media; you can realize your potential some-way or the other.
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Sample e-mails that request for affiliate links |
Example of an unsolicited email inviting to take part in link farm schemes:
From: Rebecca <rebecca@gmail.com>
Date: Thurs, Oct 29, 2002 at 01:10 PM
Subject: Inviting to take part in link farm schemes
To: asd98@gmail.com
Cc: Cealo <cealo@dataone.in>
Dear Webmaster,
I just visited your site and thought that it would make an excellent affiliate link partner with our site. We guarantee that your webpage will also be benefitted in return. To get started, just click on the link below and follow the instructions.
(http://www.link-farm.com/cgi-bin/signup.cgi)
Respectfully,
Rebecca.
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Screen Shots |
Participating in link farm and link spam schemes means you are risking search engine index expulsion.
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Working Examples |
(http://www.electroniccigarettesreviews.net/)
When an SEO offers to purchase links for you in order to improve your rankings, know that this is considered a black hat technique. Since every SEO company I've ever encountered, including freelancers, offers this service, it is unfortunately not advisable that it be ignored. These link builders and link brokers who build links on mass can put links to your site on very shoddy sites, otherwise known as link farms. These farms literally just list links with their anchor texts (the linked keyword) and descriptions (the surrounding unlinked text), one after another, completely unrelated and with no driving content. Putting links to your site on link farms can result in a very poor quality score on Google and should be avoided wherever possible.
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |