Illegal SEO practices – Link Farms

LINK FARMS

Also known as Spamexing or Spamdexing.

A link farm is a series of websites created solely for housing gratuitous links that point to a collection of websites. It can also be a network of websites interlinking with each other.

Such websites are considered illegal in the eyes of Google and major search engines because they aim to achieve high rankings for websites that haven’t earned those rankings through good content and overall quality.

As a strategy, utilizing link farms, or spamdexing a search engine, is highly dangerous.

Even if your website has great content, if you or your SEO consultant use this technique, your website will still get penalized or banned because the engines figure that if you did have good content you wouldn’t resort to such sneaky tactics designed to trick them.

HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IT

When an SEO professional tells you that he or she will secure incoming links for you, ask them to tell you specifically how they will do so. The correct answer is that they will target specific, pre-existing and established websites to gain an incoming link from them to you (in most cases without having to link back to them).

If a professional tells you that they will build you hundreds or thousands of pages across

different domains that will link to your website, do NOT work with them as this will severely cripple your website.

Also periodically search your domain name in the major search engines to see which sites are pointing to you. If you see anything out of the ordinary, such as websites whose domains are extremely long or gibberish (lots of numbers and random or inappropriate words) or pages that are simply long lists of links, approach your SEO professional about getting your site removed from these pages and find out how they appeared there in the first place.