Overview of Link Farms
Rankings of a webpage get a major boost by using high quality link farms. Or so they say. Good linking habits are encouraged by almost all the major search engines. Search engines completely disregard and ban the sites that make use of unfair/bad linking strategies. There is a specific set of techniques/strategies along with some guidelines which are set out by most search engines. These guidelines should be followed by the SEO experts to ensure advertisement rewards.
A link farm refers to a network including many sites which link themselves with the other sites. The main purpose of link farms is to gain more popularity and traffic. This happens when any particular website gives reciprocal links to other sites within the network and in turn gets numerous links. These are however irrelevant and unrelated links. This is also known as spamming and the search engines straightaway penalize the sites linking to such link farms. Most often such sites are removed from the index of the search engines.
Rise and Fall of Link Farms
Link farms came into existence when some clever coders developed them to take undue advantage of a search engine named ‘Inktomi’. This search engine depended on link popularity to rank websites. Yahoo, one of the most successful search engines, also made use of the results from Inktomi to supplement its own searching results. But when Google came into being, the importance shifted towards page ranking instead of link building. Member pages were helped by link farms in order to achieve an increase in the page rank.
Later on the managers of the link farms started implementing quality checks and demanded fair methods. The members were asked to comply with the rules and regulations. This autonomy led to the downfall of the link farms. Since then, link farms are avoided as they are not considered fair.
Major Search engines and Link Farms
The influence of link farms has diminished drastically. Major search engines have started indexing more website based on other complex characteristics. Nowadays, link farms do not help in retaining higher positions in the search engines. No doubt, links farms are amidst the popular tools for increasing the page ranks but they are not accepted by the major search engines. The search engines expect that the webmasters to not indulge in such linking habits. Webmasters who are still making use of link farms are under an increased risk of getting their sites penalized.
Links and Not Link Farms Are the Key
Link farms have boundless links that lead to other websites instead of page to page links within the website. However, link farms are not bothered about the relevancy of the websites. Emphasis is laid just on high ranking. Link farms lead to spam which further leads to degradation of the site’s reputation. So, better concentrate on less but high quality links.
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