Link Farms

A Link Farm can be defined as a group of web pages containing hundreds of links to unrelated or interlinked web sites created with the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity and search engine rankings. These Link farms are usually created by programs and software and not necessarily produced by human beings.

Although Link Farms may appear as a one stop shop for any web site to attain hundreds of links at once, the major drawback of getting linked to them is the deteriorated quality and value of links. Unlike the related and valid links which you could have otherwise obtained by linking to the sites with related information, links you would be obtaining by participating in link farming would be with totally unrelated sites.

Practicing link exchange with the help of Link Farms is also referred to as Link Stuffing. This is because the sites listed in these link farms mostly do not carry any quality or worth with them. These are just stuffed on to the web pages of the Link Farms for the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity and ultimately, link popularity by linking to hundreds of links, obtained easily through these web pages. The quality and value of these Link Farms is deteriorated because, they contain thousands of links to other sites, but they themselves do not offer little or any content which is original, genuine and relevant to them or any other sites they are further linking to.

Quite often the content contained in these sites are either copied or plagiarized from various other web sites, without their knowledge or permission with the sole purpose of trying to improve the relevancy or improve the validity of these Link Farms with the Search Engines.

Also, the sites or links listed with these Link Farms hardly hold any relevance with each other and the visitors coming to these link farms are diverted to sites which are hardly of their interests. Therefore, it is always better to exchange and include links with the relevant and related sites, which can help your visitors to explore more information of similar interests by clicking on to those links.

Another reason to avoid using Link Farms ..all Bad linking strategies is most likely to get your web site banned by certain search engines. And Link Farms offer exactly that- Bad or Irrelevant Links, which are not related to each other.

Links should only be considered if they are related to your theme or subject, providing your visitors with valuable information on those topics. However, link farms rarely provide such useful content to its visitors.

If your sites theme is say, popular brands of surfing gear and related accessories and you include links to the suppliers sites or links to online stores that sell your brands, then it may not be considered as a link farm, rather, a relevant Link Exchange method. This is because, here, you are providing your visitors, access to other related sites on the same theme.

The main disadvantage of using methods like Link Farming, Free for All Links and Link Stuffing is that such practices are done with the sole purpose of deceiving the search engines as they assign rankings to a site, according to the number of web pages that link to its specific page. The plan is to make the search engine believe, that the promoted page is extremely popular because of all the pages that are linking to it, eventually tricking the search engines into giving it a high ranking.

Search engines these days are pretty good at recognising dishonest links. They are quick to penalise sites that try to use spam links to gain popularity, with the help of unrelated links.

Good Linking Strategies always work with the search engines. If you practice Link Building staying within your theme, keeping your links focused on your site's topic. Also, Search engines don't just go by the quantity of links, but, they comprehensively evaluate the relative importance of both, the inbound as well as the outbound links. Therefore it is very important to consider the quality and relevance of the links before linking to them.

Also, automated link generators should be avoided as they send impersonal automated emails to other webmasters, offering to trade links with them. This method is rarely successful. What is required is a personalised e mail which contains the request and the reason for it, showing the webmaster that you have taken the pains to go through his site and are genuinely interested in linking to it.

Search engine optimisation tutorial - optimizing source code to improve page load times