Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | PageRank

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.