Eight worst search optimization techniques - Link farms

June 24, 2007

What it is:

Link farms are pages that consist solely of links to other pages but fail to offer any kind of useful content themselves. Site owners typically place their links on farms to artificially boost linking popularity and thus rankings on sites like Google. Some link farms are automatically generated, while site owners manage others as a repository of reciprocal links.

Why you shouldn’t do it:

Human-edited link farms are certainly preferable to automatically generated ones, but it looks pointless to site viewers to come across a page full of links with little to no relevance to your actual site content. The major search engines are starting to crack down on link farms by scanning for linking patterns that analyze inbound links to a site, and in some cases it can hurt your page rankings to be on a link farm.

It’s important not to confuse link farms with actual pages of well-chosen relevant links. It is an excellent idea to email site owners that cover similar content to your site and ask them to post a link, but it is a bad idea to try to get a link posted to your site on every URL you can find that is willing to post a link regardless of subject matter.

Hidden links

What they are:

Invisible links are hidden in images or in text on pages and exist for the benefit of the spider rather than the user. The idea behind them is to provide additional links within the page for the spider to find and index or to artificially boost link popularity.

Why you shouldn’t do it:

This is another attempt to trick search engines that many frown upon and will ban you for if you are caught. As always, search engines’ primary concern is maintaining highly relevant search results for their users and this tactic is frequently abused to boost rankings for irrelevant sites. In fact, it’s quite common for some optimization firms to hide links to their own sites within clients’ websites – which can definitely backfire for the clients.

(Part 3 of 5)

Posted in SEO