A link farm is a group of sites that link to other sites in order to boost the link popularity of those sites. This is when a website gets links from a lot of different sites that have nothing to do with it. This is called spamming, and a search engine will remove any website that has anything to do with a link farm.
Backgrounder on Link Farms
Search engine optimizers made the first link farms so they could take advantage of the fact that the Inktomi search engine relied on link popularity. Because it was used by a number of independent but popular search engines, it was a target for manipulation using link farms. Yahoo!, which was one of the most popular search engines at the time, also used Inktomi results to help with its own directory search. Link farms helped business websites that didn't have many natural links from more stable sites get listed on more stable sites.
Most search engines use how popular a link is to decide how to rank search results. But when link farms started, the Inktomi engine was keeping track of two indexes. The search results from the primary index are limited to about 100,000,000 pages, so pages with few inbound links often fell out of the index. At first, link farm exchange was handled informally, but later, a number of service companies were created to handle automated registration, categorization, and updating of link pages on member websites.
PageRank is a way to figure out how important a link is by how much weight it has. It became possible when Google's search engine came out. PageRank gives more importance to links that it thinks are more useful than others. Link farming was used to boost the PageRank of member pages. Soon, unscrupulous webmasters found ways to take advantage of this. They still got links coming in, but they found ways to hide outgoing links or not post any links to their sites at all. Link farm managers had to set up quality controls and make sure members followed the rules that were put in place to make sure everything was fair.
As a result, other link farm products like link-finding software, which finds possible link partners, came into being. This made it possible to send emails based on templates that asked for link exchanges. For websites that wanted to get more links and PageRank, pages with links that looked like directories were made. Search engines fought back against the link farm trend by trying to figure out what made a link farm a link farm. Once they did that, they removed those pages from their indexes and search results. In some cases, whole domains had to be taken down to stop the possible effects of link farms on search results.
Link farms had less of an effect on crawling as search engines got better at indexing more sites. Link farms were no longer needed to help sites keep their spots in primary indexes. But it was still a popular way to boost PageRank or what people thought was an equivalent value. Since then, Inktomi's technology has become part of Yahoo!, and the term "Link Farm" is now seen as an insult by most people.
There is still a debate going on about how important it is to use PageRank to rank search results. Trustworthy search engines all advise webmasters to ask for relevant links to their sites instead of joining link farms. Sites that take part in link farms might have their search rankings lowered as a result.
Spam Page from a Link Farm or Not?
Link farms are usually sites that have a long list of links to other sites instead of links from one page to the next on the same site. Relevance to a site is not a big factor in choosing links, since the main point of linking is to get a high search engine ranking. The goal of these websites is no longer to give users good information. Instead, they focus on getting a high search rank by having a lot of links.
When a certain website is part of a link farm, this is said to be the case. As a safe measure, there shouldn't be more than 100 links on a page, based on what we know now. Some people are worried that having a lot of internal links will be seen as a link farm.
A link farm is a group of websites that each link to the other websites in the group. It can be made by hand, but most of the time it is made by programmes and services that do it automatically. It is sometimes called "spamdexing" because it is a way to spam a search engine's index. The term "spaghetti code" is often used to describe code that has a complicated control structure and uses unstructured branching constructs.
The way link farms are set up is based on an algorithm that puts more weight on the voting power of "authority sites." People think that pages that are related to each other will link to each other and that pages with a lot of authority will link to other authoritative pages. On the other hand, a site's reputation goes down when it is linked to spam sites or sites that use Black-Hat SEO. When a site is linked to other sites with a bad reputation, it is more likely to be labelled as irrelevant by search engines.
As long as spammers keep getting around the real reason for linking, the value of linking back and forth will continue to go down. Too many links that don't go anywhere are useless and can be seen as spam by people and search engines. When there are more than 50 links on a page, a link directory that doesn't have clear, organised categories for the links can be seen as a link farm.
TrustRank is used to fight against the different ways people try to get higher rankings in a search engine's results than they actually deserve. It uses a method that involves finding good seed pages by hand and using their link structure to find other likely good pages. Its goal is to cut down on spam and give searchers the real content they want.
There are a number of ways to make sure that a website's link directory doesn't get grouped with other link farms. Adding a link directory to a website has its own benefits, but care should be taken so that a page doesn't have too many outbound links that make it less useful. If a website's links are very different and don't seem to go together, they will need to be put into groups so that they do.
Using clear, concise titles and descriptions for categories will help searchers (both people and search engine spiders) understand what a category is about so that the relevancy can be measured correctly. You don't have to agree to every link exchange request, especially if the site asking for the link doesn't fit well with your site's theme and goals. It is strongly suggested that approved link exchanges be checked up on regularly to see how they are doing and decide if it is still okay to keep linking to them. It's possible that even though some links look good at first, they have been banned, shut down, or moved. These things are out of anyone's control, so the best thing a website can do is work hard to keep its links and content up-to-date so it can keep getting qualified traffic. Link farms may be old-fashioned in some ways, but they keep coming back in different forms.
