Beware The Link Farms – Avoiding Mistakes In Seo Link Building

We never ignore the mail box when it comes to useful search engine optimisation tools. Reputable SEO services regularly send links to products and software that can transform our internet marketing schemes – for the better. However, if you regularly get suspect emails or blog posts from unknowns, gushing how much they loved linking to your web page, and would it be okay to put a backlink on their site, chances are it’s a link farm. You may just think, “Cheeky so-and-so!” and leave it at that. Yet you may be tempted to go along with them, place the link, and then check the site out.

When you do, you’ll discover the site has nothing to do with your product or service. It will be something like a basic directory, but with a lot less content. Just thousands of URLs, arranged seemingly at random – one of which is yours. Much as the owners may try to tell you otherwise, these sites aren’t handy search engine optimisation tools – they can get you banned. Far from building you hundreds of new links, they’re suicide to your internet marketing plan.

Link farms don’t work – it’s as simple as that. Any fool can see that listing thousands of site URLs, with no accompanying text or categorisation, will do nothing for the search engine optimisation of those sites. Yet people still get taken in.

Link farming became popular in the early days of SEO link building , when it was thought that all your website needed was as many links as possible, in order to get high rankings on the search engines. The other misconception was that any reciprocal link would get you ranked highly, no matter who that link was with. Dozens of link farms sprang up, and thousands of site owners were coerced into linking to them. Sites dedicated to link farming even issued software to make the job easier for their users – and they still are today. Even though tools for Google routinely filters these sites out of the page rankings, requests still come to mail boxes – and site owners still act on them.

No reputable search engine optimization company will ever tell you to use a link farm – or use one themselves. They reek of desperation, and are regarded as unprofessional. From the perspective of SEO link building, does it make sense to link to somewhere that has hundreds of websites leading away from your own? Never mind that the browsing public are unlikely to go to your site from there anyway – the only people visiting will be desperate website owners, wondering where all their promised backlinks had got to.

When link farms reached their peak, the search engine databases became saturated with dozens of pages that had no purpose other than to link to websites. This became a serious hindrance, since the directories’ aim is to provide quality, relevant content linked to specific searches. For this reason, Google and other search engines began penalising sites that had link farm connections, and continue to do so today.

There are many SEO link building strategies, but link farming isn’t one of them. If you get one of those emails – label it as phishing, and move on.

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