Link farms are created with the sole purpose of listing links to other sites. They are not used by real people because their content is usually very poor and many of the sites they link to in their list are of very low quality. So why do these farms exist and are they used? Google search results page is constantly changing. A link farm can be described as one of the black hat SEO techniques, where a group of websites link to each other jointly and receive links artificially and unnaturally.
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What is Link Farm?
Link farms were first developed by SEOs in 1999 to take advantage of Inktomi’s search engine independence in terms of link popularity. Although link popularity is used by some search engines to create a ranking order on the search results page, the Inktomi search engine at the time maintained two indexes. Search results were generated from the original index, which was limited to 100 million listings. Pages that had few inbound links were kicked out of Inktomi’s list every month.
Because of this, Inktomi was targeted to lure SEOs through link farming, as it was used by several independent but popular search engines at the time. Yahoo!, the most popular search engine at the time, also used Inktomi to display search results. The link farm helped to stabilize the main listings for business websites that had few natural links from larger and more well-known sites than those in the Inktomi index.
Link farm exchanges were done manually at first, but little by little, a series of companies were created that could provide their audience with automated registration along with categorizing and updating page links.
When the Google search engine became popular, SEOs realized that Google’s ranking algorithm depended on part of a link weighting pattern called PageRank. Instead of counting all inbound links equally, the PageRank algorithm recognizes that some links may be more valuable than others, so it gives them more weight than others. The link farm also adapted to these changes to increase the audience’s PageRank.
Over time, there have been many alternative products in the field of link farming, especially link finder software that finds potential link exchange partners and sends them an identical email format offering link exchange and a directory of links. Websites would create pages, hoping to gain more link popularity and better PageRank. These link farms are sometimes considered one of the black hat SEO strategies.
So far, Google has not been very successful in controlling and eliminating link farms, but they quickly started to announce that directories that exist solely to provide backlinks will be identified as link farms. If you have a link from here, it will not count. This decision still stands today.
The question is, how can Google distinguish a directory without problems from a link farm? It is very simple. If the category pages are mixed, this is a very strong indication that this is a very poor-quality directory and most likely a link farm. If no one is backlinking to these directories, other than the people who had to do so to get in, this is another sign that it looks like a link farm.
How to distinguish a directory from a link farm?
Is this directory managed or do they accept anything? Instant acceptance no matter what you register is what a link farm means.
If you search for a directory name, do you see the actual person on the Internet who points to it? If real people aren’t talking about it, it’s a link farm.
Do lists provide much more useful information than just a link? If the link forms the main part of this list, it is the link farm.
Are you interested in getting listed on thousands of directories for a small fee? Link Farm is waiting for you!
Now that we pretty much understand what Link Farms are for and how they are created, let’s take another look at a better definition of them.
What is the purpose of a link farm?
A link farm is a website (or a group of websites) built for the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity of another site by increasing the number of incoming links. A link farm usually looks like a normal page, but most of the content on it is usually random and unrelated hyperlinks to other websites.
Link farms can be advertised as services for producing your content. They are usually started by creating a network; A network used for the sole purpose of collecting several locations to point to a website. Since Google doesn’t like links between unrelated sites, some link farms divide their links into different categories or directories.
Websites that create link farms may be penalized by Google and other search engines. Using a link farm is considered a black hat SEO technique because the content on the sites that link to each other are unrelated, not created by a human, and usually of very low quality. Link farms can be easily detected by search engines and therefore should not be viewed as a valid SEO method in the long run.