Link Farming: No Good Harvest - A Few Good Linking Strategies
So you know that link farms don’t work and in fact can get you penalized in the SERPs. But you also know that you need to have links if you want to build your position in the SERPs. Link farms may get you lots of links fast, but the links aren’t relevant – and relevant links will ultimately do far more for you than large quantities of junk links.
So how do you get these relevant links? There are a number of articles here on SEO Chat that cover link building and link trading. And if you want a good general approach, you’d be wise to follow the advice of Larisa Thomason, Senior Web Analyst for NetMechanic. It’s every bit as relevant now as when she first gave it in 2002. She emphasized four points:
Stay with your theme. Make sure that all of the links that appear on your site are relevant to your site’s topic.
Hang out with the popular crowd. Search engines look at the relative importance of your links, not just their number. According to Thomason, “It’s far better to have 100 good inbound links from popular pages than 1000 links from a link farm stuffed with spam sites.”
Avoid automated link generators. This doesn’t mean you can’t trade links with other sites, but if you do, don’t send automated emails. Do your research on the other site – and make sure anyone who sends you an email for a link exchange has done their homework about yours.
Put links in context. This helps the search engine algorithms work in your favor. As Thomason explains, “Links that are included in page content and contain the page's keywords are more valuable than links exiled to a site’s ‘Related Links’ page.”
If you’re looking to grow your web site’s popularity, don’t do it with link farms. All you’ll harvest is search engine penalties and annoyed visitors. Keep it real, and keep it relevant. Remember, most things of value – including a good web site – take time to grow.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/3/
Showing posts with label link farm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label link farm. Show all posts
Friday, May 18, 2007
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Link Directories vs. Natural Linking vs. Link Farms
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Link Directories vs. Natural Linking vs. Link Farms
Is there an obvious way to tell the difference between a link directory and a link farm? And how do you avoid link farms? The question has particular relevance since it can be easy to fall into a link farm unintentionally. Alice Seba on Internet Based Moms mentioned a link program her friend Tara was once involved in. While she’d never participated in that kind of program herself, she “still didn’t realize it was a link farm. It was just a group of moms in business trying to find a way to help promote each other.”
The key, as with so much of SEO, is relevance. Say you’re a Star Trek fan, and you have a web site devoted to that interest. You can legitimately link to other fan sites, stores that sell Star Trek memorabilia, professional or personal sites for the actors in the series, and so on. These would all naturally be of interest to anyone visiting your web site. (Sorry, links to toupee sites would probably be stretching it, even for the Shatner fans).
What does not work is signing up with a company that promises you hundreds of inbound links if you promise to add the same number of outbound links. That’s a link farm. The links you get will probably not be relevant. So if you get an email that appears to have been automatically generated, and is requesting a reciprocal link exchange, be very suspicious. If you check out their site and it doesn’t seem to be remotely relevant to yours, run the other way. In particular, if they’re asking you for a link on your links page, and you don’t have a links page, you can bet this is an automatic solicitation, and they didn’t do their homework.
Now as it is, there are some who would argue that link directories are becoming obsolete. Some of our own writers, in fact, think they’re on their last legs. Many SEOs seem to think that at least DMOZ is still worth it, though, and that there are a few good directories still out there.
Incidentally, if you check your back links one day and find that a link farm is linking to you, don’t panic. Google won’t kill you for it. The search engine assumes that you can’t control who links to you. On the other hand, it also assumes that you control what sites you link to, so don’t link to link farms or other “bad neighborhoods.” (And it doesn’t do any harm to check the sites you link to every so often just to make sure they’re still there – and still relevant to your site).
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/2/
Is there an obvious way to tell the difference between a link directory and a link farm? And how do you avoid link farms? The question has particular relevance since it can be easy to fall into a link farm unintentionally. Alice Seba on Internet Based Moms mentioned a link program her friend Tara was once involved in. While she’d never participated in that kind of program herself, she “still didn’t realize it was a link farm. It was just a group of moms in business trying to find a way to help promote each other.”
The key, as with so much of SEO, is relevance. Say you’re a Star Trek fan, and you have a web site devoted to that interest. You can legitimately link to other fan sites, stores that sell Star Trek memorabilia, professional or personal sites for the actors in the series, and so on. These would all naturally be of interest to anyone visiting your web site. (Sorry, links to toupee sites would probably be stretching it, even for the Shatner fans).
What does not work is signing up with a company that promises you hundreds of inbound links if you promise to add the same number of outbound links. That’s a link farm. The links you get will probably not be relevant. So if you get an email that appears to have been automatically generated, and is requesting a reciprocal link exchange, be very suspicious. If you check out their site and it doesn’t seem to be remotely relevant to yours, run the other way. In particular, if they’re asking you for a link on your links page, and you don’t have a links page, you can bet this is an automatic solicitation, and they didn’t do their homework.
Now as it is, there are some who would argue that link directories are becoming obsolete. Some of our own writers, in fact, think they’re on their last legs. Many SEOs seem to think that at least DMOZ is still worth it, though, and that there are a few good directories still out there.
Incidentally, if you check your back links one day and find that a link farm is linking to you, don’t panic. Google won’t kill you for it. The search engine assumes that you can’t control who links to you. On the other hand, it also assumes that you control what sites you link to, so don’t link to link farms or other “bad neighborhoods.” (And it doesn’t do any harm to check the sites you link to every so often just to make sure they’re still there – and still relevant to your site).
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/2/
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Some Background
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Some Background
While most sources I’ve seen date link farms to Google’s arrival on the scene, Wikipedia puts their origins a bit earlier. They were supposedly used in 1999 by SEOs to take advantage of Inktomi’s algorithm, which depended on link popularity. Back in the day, Inktomi’s primary index included only 100 million listings. Pages that didn’t have a lot of links regularly fell out of the primary index; link farms were supposed to help stabilize listings for web sites that had few natural inbound links.
When Google came on the scene, the link farmers had to adjust their techniques some, because it didn’t weigh votes the same way. Not every vote was equal. Still, link farming continued to prosper for a while, and eventually became automated. Link-finding software emerged, designed to hunt down potential link partners, send template-based emails, and build directory-like web pages containing the links.
It should surprise no one that what one computer program can create, another can detect. Link farms leave distinct patterns. Search engine algorithms can be tuned to these patterns. Once a link farm is detected, it’s easy enough to remove it from the index. And more often than not, that’s exactly what search engines do nowadays.
There’s a very good reason for this. Take another look at the end of the last section, and how big a link farm can become. You’re talking about 100,000 sites, each with hundreds of pages made up of nothing but links. Usually, with a link farm, there is no real information about any of the sites; there may be a one sentence description, but it could just as easily include only the links without a description. The links may be in no particular order and show no sign that any of them are related to the site hosting them in any way.
If you ran a search engine, would you want that kind of thing cluttering up your index? Of course not. Your job is to serve your visitors with the most relevant results possible. Link farms don’t help that cause at all. They’re no longer necessary for helping web sites stay in primary indexes; indeed, they haven’t been needed for that purpose for years. Even as far back as 2002, Kimberly Krause Berg, writing for Search Engine Guide, pointed out that link farms were “illogical, especially if your website was trying to generate sales leads or sell products or services. The appearance of link farm pages made some web sites appear unprofessional.”
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/1/
While most sources I’ve seen date link farms to Google’s arrival on the scene, Wikipedia puts their origins a bit earlier. They were supposedly used in 1999 by SEOs to take advantage of Inktomi’s algorithm, which depended on link popularity. Back in the day, Inktomi’s primary index included only 100 million listings. Pages that didn’t have a lot of links regularly fell out of the primary index; link farms were supposed to help stabilize listings for web sites that had few natural inbound links.
When Google came on the scene, the link farmers had to adjust their techniques some, because it didn’t weigh votes the same way. Not every vote was equal. Still, link farming continued to prosper for a while, and eventually became automated. Link-finding software emerged, designed to hunt down potential link partners, send template-based emails, and build directory-like web pages containing the links.
It should surprise no one that what one computer program can create, another can detect. Link farms leave distinct patterns. Search engine algorithms can be tuned to these patterns. Once a link farm is detected, it’s easy enough to remove it from the index. And more often than not, that’s exactly what search engines do nowadays.
There’s a very good reason for this. Take another look at the end of the last section, and how big a link farm can become. You’re talking about 100,000 sites, each with hundreds of pages made up of nothing but links. Usually, with a link farm, there is no real information about any of the sites; there may be a one sentence description, but it could just as easily include only the links without a description. The links may be in no particular order and show no sign that any of them are related to the site hosting them in any way.
If you ran a search engine, would you want that kind of thing cluttering up your index? Of course not. Your job is to serve your visitors with the most relevant results possible. Link farms don’t help that cause at all. They’re no longer necessary for helping web sites stay in primary indexes; indeed, they haven’t been needed for that purpose for years. Even as far back as 2002, Kimberly Krause Berg, writing for Search Engine Guide, pointed out that link farms were “illogical, especially if your website was trying to generate sales leads or sell products or services. The appearance of link farm pages made some web sites appear unprofessional.”
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/1/
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - 1
Link Farming: No Good Harvest - 1
The SEO field is new, constantly growing, and often in flux. As a side effect, it gets a constant stream of new people who aren’t familiar with the correct practices and pitfalls of the profession. That means some of the same questions get asked repeatedly; it almost seems like they come in cycles, especially on SEO forums. One of these questions is about link farming.
It’s no surprise that the topic of link farming brings up so many questions or causes such confusion. It’s very easy to confuse link farming with link directories. One of these gets penalized in the search engines (especially Google) while the other one doesn’t. At first glance, however, the two practices may look the same. So how do you tell the difference?
A link farm is a group of web pages that all link to every other page in the group. It’s designed to raise the rankings of all the sites in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is different from a link directory in that it isn’t just one site doing it; all of the sites are involved. They all have their own link pages that link to every other site.
I didn’t fully understand how link farms work until fathom, one of the more active members of our SEO Chat forum, recently gave a “dumb down” explanation in a thread asking whether link farming was really spam. As he puts it, “A link farm is basically no different than the phenomena known as a chain mail scheme but rather than money changing hands - links are.”
In fathom’s example, three people started a link farm; each one added a new page to their sites that contains a link to all three sites. Then a fourth person joins the farm and adds an identical page of links to her site; all four web sites now contain pages with links to all four sites.
This starts small and might even be undetectable by the search engines at first. But it can grow to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. By the time you get a link farm that big you have hundreds of pages in each web site that are all carbon copies of each other, and all pointing to all of those carbon copies. In short, it’s a mess.
The SEO field is new, constantly growing, and often in flux. As a side effect, it gets a constant stream of new people who aren’t familiar with the correct practices and pitfalls of the profession. That means some of the same questions get asked repeatedly; it almost seems like they come in cycles, especially on SEO forums. One of these questions is about link farming.
It’s no surprise that the topic of link farming brings up so many questions or causes such confusion. It’s very easy to confuse link farming with link directories. One of these gets penalized in the search engines (especially Google) while the other one doesn’t. At first glance, however, the two practices may look the same. So how do you tell the difference?
A link farm is a group of web pages that all link to every other page in the group. It’s designed to raise the rankings of all the sites in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is different from a link directory in that it isn’t just one site doing it; all of the sites are involved. They all have their own link pages that link to every other site.
I didn’t fully understand how link farms work until fathom, one of the more active members of our SEO Chat forum, recently gave a “dumb down” explanation in a thread asking whether link farming was really spam. As he puts it, “A link farm is basically no different than the phenomena known as a chain mail scheme but rather than money changing hands - links are.”
In fathom’s example, three people started a link farm; each one added a new page to their sites that contains a link to all three sites. Then a fourth person joins the farm and adds an identical page of links to her site; all four web sites now contain pages with links to all four sites.
This starts small and might even be undetectable by the search engines at first. But it can grow to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. By the time you get a link farm that big you have hundreds of pages in each web site that are all carbon copies of each other, and all pointing to all of those carbon copies. In short, it’s a mess.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
SEO Off-page Optimizing
SEO Off-page Optimizing
Off-page optimizing is to have links that come to your site. You hear internet marketers talk about having links point to their website or to a particular web page. Off-page optimizing makes your website look more valuable when other sites link to yours.
When looking for sites to link back to your site, look for sites having a higher page ranking than yours and are related to your site in some way. Higher-ranked sites help up your page ranking more than lower- ranked sites. Although, just about any site that links to your site will be a plus. Links of this nature are called one-way links.
Another type of link is a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link is linking back to the other website that is linking to you. Make certain the other website retains your link on their site. If they do remove your link, ask them to put it back. On the other hand, you can remove their link from your site.
In addition, set up a trade links page. When you do, it should contain pages that are sub-categories (i.e. marketing, investing, real estate). By doing this, it is much easier for you to maintain the list of links. The other reason is that you do not want to have over 20 outbound links on any given page. What do I mean by outbound links? An outbound link is any link that points to any web page that is not part of your website.
Indexed pages verses ranked pages
There is a difference between having your website or web page indexed verses ranked. To have your website indexed; search engines crawl your site at least once, know about your site, and insert your URL into their index of sites to crawl.
One of the easiest and fastest ways to have your site indexed is to include your URL in a message on a blog or forum that has a lot of traffic. Another way, although it is slower, is to submit articles and press releases.
Page rank is harder to come by. Three things determine the page ranking of your site: use of keywords in the content of your site; how many sites link back to your site and the quality of those sites (link popularity); and the text that these sites have used to link to you (anchor text).
When your site has a page rank, it usually means that you are receiving a fair amount of traffic and are building up what is called back links. Back links come when another site puts your link on their site. If, at all possible, you want to link with sites that have a page ranking of 3 or above.
Things to stay away from
Here are some things that can get you banned from search engines:
* Hidden text
o This is when you make the font color the same as the background color so that your customers are not able to see the wording. A way to check if sites are doing this is to press (Ctrl A). You could hide keywords in the body of your web page and no one will see them. You could also put other content on the page that no one would see but the search engines.
* Hidden links
o This is the same thing as hidden text only you do it with links. Let’s say on your squeeze page you want to put a link to another page on your website, but you don’t want anyone to go there, for whatever reason. This would be an example where you would hide the link and run a chance of having your site banned from the search engines.
* Keyword stuffing
o Keyword stuffing is using the exact same keyword repeatedly and in your alt tags, Meta tags, and title tags. This practice could get you banned from search engines. If you use your keywords in these tags and they are not repeated more than three times in each tag, you should be fine.
* Page cloaking
o A cloaked page is a page created to be invisible to the regular visitor of your website. The cloaked page contains code in it to detect when a search engine spider comes on the site. The spider is diverted to this cloaked page, which is set up to make your site look like one thing to a search engine in order to increase your search engine position on searches. What your customer sees is something entirely different.
* Doorways or bridge pages
o Doorway or bridge pages use the same concept as a cloaked page, but usually are located at different web hosting companies.
* Link Farms
o Link farms are "black hat" (taboo). Link farms are sites that consist of links to other sites and advertising of some sort. Their main goal is to provide a link to other sites and make money off advertising. There is usually no valuable content at all on these sites.
Off-page optimizing is to have links that come to your site. You hear internet marketers talk about having links point to their website or to a particular web page. Off-page optimizing makes your website look more valuable when other sites link to yours.
When looking for sites to link back to your site, look for sites having a higher page ranking than yours and are related to your site in some way. Higher-ranked sites help up your page ranking more than lower- ranked sites. Although, just about any site that links to your site will be a plus. Links of this nature are called one-way links.
Another type of link is a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link is linking back to the other website that is linking to you. Make certain the other website retains your link on their site. If they do remove your link, ask them to put it back. On the other hand, you can remove their link from your site.
In addition, set up a trade links page. When you do, it should contain pages that are sub-categories (i.e. marketing, investing, real estate). By doing this, it is much easier for you to maintain the list of links. The other reason is that you do not want to have over 20 outbound links on any given page. What do I mean by outbound links? An outbound link is any link that points to any web page that is not part of your website.
Indexed pages verses ranked pages
There is a difference between having your website or web page indexed verses ranked. To have your website indexed; search engines crawl your site at least once, know about your site, and insert your URL into their index of sites to crawl.
One of the easiest and fastest ways to have your site indexed is to include your URL in a message on a blog or forum that has a lot of traffic. Another way, although it is slower, is to submit articles and press releases.
Page rank is harder to come by. Three things determine the page ranking of your site: use of keywords in the content of your site; how many sites link back to your site and the quality of those sites (link popularity); and the text that these sites have used to link to you (anchor text).
When your site has a page rank, it usually means that you are receiving a fair amount of traffic and are building up what is called back links. Back links come when another site puts your link on their site. If, at all possible, you want to link with sites that have a page ranking of 3 or above.
Things to stay away from
Here are some things that can get you banned from search engines:
* Hidden text
o This is when you make the font color the same as the background color so that your customers are not able to see the wording. A way to check if sites are doing this is to press (Ctrl A). You could hide keywords in the body of your web page and no one will see them. You could also put other content on the page that no one would see but the search engines.
* Hidden links
o This is the same thing as hidden text only you do it with links. Let’s say on your squeeze page you want to put a link to another page on your website, but you don’t want anyone to go there, for whatever reason. This would be an example where you would hide the link and run a chance of having your site banned from the search engines.
* Keyword stuffing
o Keyword stuffing is using the exact same keyword repeatedly and in your alt tags, Meta tags, and title tags. This practice could get you banned from search engines. If you use your keywords in these tags and they are not repeated more than three times in each tag, you should be fine.
* Page cloaking
o A cloaked page is a page created to be invisible to the regular visitor of your website. The cloaked page contains code in it to detect when a search engine spider comes on the site. The spider is diverted to this cloaked page, which is set up to make your site look like one thing to a search engine in order to increase your search engine position on searches. What your customer sees is something entirely different.
* Doorways or bridge pages
o Doorway or bridge pages use the same concept as a cloaked page, but usually are located at different web hosting companies.
* Link Farms
o Link farms are "black hat" (taboo). Link farms are sites that consist of links to other sites and advertising of some sort. Their main goal is to provide a link to other sites and make money off advertising. There is usually no valuable content at all on these sites.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Link Farm
On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web pages that all hyperlink to every other page in the group.
Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services.
A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamexing or spamdexing).
Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.
Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services.
A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamexing or spamdexing).
Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.
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