Link Farm
A link farm is a web page that consists of hundreds of unrelated links, for the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity of other sites by increasing the number of incoming links to those sites. The primary purpose of any link farm is to get search engine rankings. However, engaging in link farms as a SEO practice has become strictly prohibited and in most cases search engines can and will ban you from further indexing. So, link farming / participation can be very dangerous!
To further understand the reasoning for not engaging in this practice, you must look at it from the search engines' perspective. If you link to a link farm, that means you endorse that website to your visitors. Google as well as other search engines use a voting process to determine a quality score for a website based on content, and relevance. When you endorse a link farm there isn’t any focus as to the relevance or quality of the links. Therefore a website that a search engine has already flagged as a risky link farm can devalue your site.
It is actually your outbound link to a link farm that is the most dangerous!
Link exchanges could still be a good way to increase rankings and offer some value to your visitors, but pay close attention to the sites you are linking to, and be cognizant of whom you give links to. Sites that have more then 50 links on one page could be a red flag. Do you homework and research the quality of the proposing link exchange by checking the Google PageRank of the site!
By Marcus Howery
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