Search First

If you have ever looked into the possibility of increasing your website’s link popularity you may have come across the term “link farm”. This article will provide you with more detail on what a link farm is, why they exist, why you should avoid them, and some good practices in relation to improving your website’s link popularity.

What is a Link Farm?

In simple terms a link farm is a site whose sole existence or purpose is to provide links to other sites. The aim of adding a web page to a link farm is to skew search engine results in their favour by increasing the link popularity of the web page. More often than not the websites found in a link farm all hyperlink to one another.

Why do Link Farms exist?

The rise of the link farm began when the Inktomi search engine first identified link popularity as an important factor in their ranking criteria. Inktomi later struck up a relationship with Yahoo in providing supplementary results for their directory search, which, with Yahoo being the most popular search engine at the time, added extra emphasis on the need for websites to have good link strategy in place.

What is the problem with Link Farms?

We have previously discussed why a search engine views link popularity as a factor in it’s website ranking. That being the case, many web designers and search engine optimisers decided to set up link farms specifically for the purpose of increasing their page rank, and this is where the problem arises. Link popularity is based on the theory that like-minded websites create online communities, directing their audience to other useful sources of information or compatible products/services. This is in stark contrast to a link farm, which, because of the nature of it’s creation, is simply a collection of random and unrelated web pages which have been grouped together in a contrived attempt to fool the search engines. The search engines are not static however, and once these link farming or link stuffing tactics were observed measures were put into place to ensure they no longer worked. In many cases a website found to be a part of a link farm can often be penalised by being expelled from the rankings altogether.

Good Linking Strategy

OK, so we’ve established that increasing your website’s link popularity can have positive effects on your search engine rankings, but that by using improper methods you can end up doing more harm than good. So what are the good practices in increasing link popularity?

1. Quality over quantity - The number of links is important, but you should consider the quality of the links you are requesting. It is better to have a few good links, than lots of links from spam-heavy neighbourhoods. Be patient and aim to get the right links, not simply the most links.
2. Links should be related to the theme of your site. Directory inclusion should be done manually and carefully to ensure that your website link appears in the relevant category, with descriptive and correctly chosen keywords.
3. Automated Link Generating programs have a poor conversion rate and providers may often rely on link farms to boost the number of places your site appears.

At SearchFirst our Link Connections Service is fully compliant with the latest guidelines on link popularity strategy. All submissions made are managed and maintained manually, ensuring your site is only submitted to relevant directories in theme-specific categories.