7 replies to this topic

[Bad Andy Good SEO]

Hello All,

I just finished reading the Wednesday edition of SearchDay from SearchEngineWatch.com. The article focused on link spamming and the fooling of engines to some degree.

I recently ran into this with a client, who subscribes to one such firm. One of my clients most important keywords is liquid chillers, if you use this term on google the 2nd listing is liquidchillers.com. It's link farm owned by [company name deleted]., and the main page has the PageRank greyed out (a BAD thing), page 2 however which contains even more links does have a little PageRank of 2 I believe.+

The article eluded to that fact that by participating in link farms may hurt your site from getting ranked. I have two questions. First will my client suffer from having a link farm pointing to them? Second, how can google (the search engine police) be fooled by such and obvious link spamming site and then list them number 2 for the term? I hate these long posts, and hope I didnt leave out any critical information.

Andy

Edited by Jill, 25 September 2003 - 11:47 AM.

[Jill]

Google constantly tells us that who links to us, can't hurt our sites, only who we link to.

However, I'm starting to wonder about this. I believe I have seen numerous instances where sites in those link farmy type places are getting penalized, even if they're not linking back.

I'm not positive about this, but it does have me concerned.

More research needs to be done on this to be sure.

Jill

[SearchRank]

Hopefully Google would never penalize a site that has a link farm pointing to it because it may not be the fault of the person who is receiving the link(s). If Google started to do this, what would stop one from just signing their competition up to every link farm on the Internet? This is the same principle regarding too many submissions to the search engines. If SEs were to penalize a site for submitting too much, a competitor could sit there and submit your site all day long.

I just can't see Goolge penalizing a site for being hooked up to a link farm. I could see them banning the link farm and not giving any credit for links to sites that originate from them.

[Jill]

I agree, David. But I have been seeing a lot of weird stuff in regards to sites that are link farmy. I've seen one instance where the site in question is in all kinds of farms, along with all of their competitors being in them. They definitely do NOT link back to these farms, but just being listed in hundreds of these low-value directories seems to devalue the site in questions.

As I said, I haven't studied this enough to be sure and there could certainly be other reasons for the site to be seemingly slightly penalized. But it's worth looking into.

One thing I've noticed, which I think I posted elsewhere, many of the "all link" type of pages have PR0's or grayed out PRs. Now a link from them should theoretically just not count at all. But I'm just not so sure....

Jill

[SearchRank]

Here's something to think about: If a link farm charges to be listed in their "farm" then there would be no way a competitor could maliciously add their competitor to the farm, unless of course they wanted to pay for it.

That being the case if Google identifies link farms where the only way you can get on them is to pay, then I guess they could assume the site that is indeed linked up to them is guilty. They are on the link farm, they paid for it, they are a spammer.

Interesting thought.

[Jill]

But what would make a paid-directory of that sort a link farm?

Generally a link farm provides little-to-no value to anyone, and a link back to the farm and/or the members sites is required.

A pay-to-get-in directory would most likely have worthwhile sites, and Google and the other engines would probably be happy to list and spider it.

Jill

[SearchRank]

That's true. Didn't think about that. I'm not that familiar with link farms because, ah well, we don't use them! Try to stay away from there ... their animals stink! :laugh:

I guess it is something we will just have to watch then.

[Jill]

Split off the other topics about whether SEO is spam to here:

http://www.highranki...?showtopic=1032