You may remember link farms from the early days of the Web when they were called web rings. Originally, the intention was a good one. Like-minded or thematically related sites linked to one another to help users navigate content on a given topic. Today, a link farm is a group of websites that link to every other site in the network, as well as to external sites, willy-nilly, and regardless of content, context, or relevance. With no degree of editorial selectivity, they’re considered a form of search engine spam—the online equivalent of living in a bad neighborhood.
Most link farms display tons and tons of links, with little to no relevant content on the site. The site exists to link for the sole purpose of boosting search visibility. But with no benefit to actual human users, there’s no real reason why the link farm should exist in the first place. In fact, most link farms are software-generated, not human-edited. The site’s URL is often long and nonsensical, full of keywords and phrases that bear little to no relation to its (nonexistent) content. Often, they reside at domains ending in .info or .biz, as these domains are generally the cheapest to buy.
Google, Yahoo!, and MSN all pay close attention not only to the quantity, but also to the quality of inbound and outbound links. Google’s own definition of PageRank specifically states that link relevance (the same thing as link “quality”) is accorded more weight than just the link itself.
Nonrelevant links are defined as hypertext links placed on a website or in a directory that have little to no relevance to the linking site or directory. Such links are placed for one of two reasons (or sometimes, a combination of both), as follows:
1. Increasing page rank
2. Getting a website crawled and indexed by search engine spiders
Considering a link? First, ask yourself if the site in question looks human. Does it appear to be well maintained? Is there contact information on the site, either a form or an e-mail address, which can put you in touch with a webmaster? If there’s no contact information available anywhere on the site, beware!
If the site in question is a directory, follow a few of the links in the main directory headings. Are the URLs overly long and keyword-stuffed? If you visit one of these sites, does it look pretty much the same as the site you came from? Are there more URLs per page than anyone could reasonably visit?
If there’s even the slightest whiff of suspicion that a site might be a link farm, don’t risk it. Stay away. Far away. It’s better to miss a linking opportunity than to post a link to your site and get penalized with a drop in your search engine rankings.
The same holds true when you’re linking out from your own site. You’re known by the company you keep, and if you link to a link farm or other bad neighborhood, you can be penalized as well. Linking to a site is the equivalent of recommending it to your own site visitors, human and search engine spiders alike. Just as you wouldn’t knowingly send a friend or colleague to a restaurant that’s unsanitary, or in a disreputable part of town, you don’t want to send valued traffic into an online netherworld.
Finally, beware of those purveyors of linking software who claim that you can get thousands and thousands of back links to your site with only a click of a mouse and a modest investment. There’s only one way to get good, quality, relevant links. Do the research and hand-submit every single link on every single page of your site.