5 replies to this topic

[louandel]

Hi

I am looking to put links out for my web site. I know "link farms" are penalised by Google. but hoew do I recognize a link farm? when does a website with a huge amount of links and categories for links become a link farm and therefore dangerous?

thanks

louandel
www.louandelcats.co.uk

[Jill]

The idea with linking is for you to never link to anything that you don't truly recommend to your site visitors.

With that rule in mind, it should be easy enough to spot a link farm. Do you want to point your visitors to it (or the sites contained within it)?

[louandel]

The idea with linking is for you to never link to anything that you don't truly recommend to your site visitors.

With that rule in mind, it should be easy enough to spot a link farm. Do you want to point your visitors to it (or the sites contained within it)?

Thanks Jill. Wise words. But take this for an instance. My site is a cat site. The site I want to link to is a nice enough pet site. But its link page is enormous because it has category after gategory of different pets where you can put your link. I wouldnt mind linking to the front end of this site for my visitors but is Google likely to pick up this kind of set up as a link farm? Or have I got the idea of a link farm wrong?

thanks for your time

louandel

p.s. I've just joined lynda.com again. Good link ))

[qwerty]

When you link to the pet site, will you be expected to also link to other sites that link to the pet site? Will linking to the pet site get you links from numerous other sites that link to the pet site? Will you be expected to publish a page (a page that will be provided to you) that links to the pet site and a number of other sites?

An answer of "yes" to any of those questions indicates that you might be dealing with a link farm.

A separate question is whether the site in question is linking out indiscriminately. If they're linking to any trashy site out there just to get a reciprocal link from it, then that might harm the site's trustworthiness. It doesn't make it a link farm, but it might mean that linking to it makes you less worthy of trust. Linking out to a lot of sites is OK, as long as you're doing it for your users. Linking out to lots of sites in order to get links back from lots of sites is a problem. It's up to you to look at those links and come to a decision about why the links are there.

[louandel]

I think this is making sense. Thanks qwerty.

[Michael Martinez]

I doubt you would have the time and patience to identify a link farm anyway. In a link farm, all the sites link to each other. We're not talking about 5 sites owned by the same person linking to each other -- we're talking about dozens, hundreds, or potentially even thousands of interlinked sites.

Like the others say, don't try to figure out whether a site is a link farm. Figure out what works best for your visitors. Links are only a very small part of the SEO process. Don't obsess over them.