Link Farm: should you use it?

Have you ever wondered about what link farming is and whether if this could be a beneficial strategy for your own link building and SEO boosting efforts? If this is something that you have been considering, our experts will be on hand to help you find out more! So, without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the key factors you should know about link farming, including what they are, how they work, and whether they offer a valuable solution (or not!) for your own SEO efforts overall.

What is a Link Farm?

First of all, we need to define what a link farm is. Link farms typically go by many different names, but they basically detail websites that are created with the sole purpose of generating backlinks to other websites.

Unfortunately, because their sole purpose is to offer backlinks rather than provide value for the website visitors, it’s important to consider that these sites typically offer very poor-quality content; means that the search engines frown upon these sites from a search engine ranking perspective.

Other Terms that Mean Link Farm

Some other terms which mean link farming include scraper sites, click farms, content farms, spam blogs, spamdexing, and in some cases, NBN (Private Blog Networks)

How It Works

With link farms, your website is provided with backlinks to the site, which in theory should boost your website’s ranking. There are often numerous sites operating as part of a “link farming system” theoretically boosts your site’s performance further. Since multiple websites usually link between each other in this farming situations, this often means that the number of websites involved can be numerous.

How Can Link Farm Affect Your Site Ranking

Link farming sounds, at first glance, like a quick and easy way to boost your website’s rankings in the search engines. Indeed, they offer an almost guaranteed way to get quick backlinks to your website, which would (in theory) boost your SEO ranking.

However, there’s a notable issue here: while normal backlinks usually offer significant boosts to your website’s rankings, backlinks from link farms may offer little in the way of benefit or might potentially even penalize your website’s rankings! This is because the search engines consider this type of link technique as a form of spam – and as such, there’s very little reason to engage with link farms at all.

So, if you have been looking for ways to promote your website’s search engine rankings, it’s critical that you consider the different options available to you – and, ideally, avoid link farms if you can. Even a single link to your website from a link farm might provide a negative effect for your website’s SEO ranking, negating previous SEO efforts. So, it’s crucial to be aware of these backlinks practice and attempt to avoid them overall, to promote your site’s success.

How to Identify Link Farm Sites

At this point, we’ve clarified that while link farms can provide backlinks to your site, these will often be far less valuable than backlinks from other, genuine sites. In fact, this technique is often a bad thing for your site as it’s considered as a black hat SEO tactic, and the search engines will often penalize sites that engage with this kind of practice rather than rewarding them.

Therefore, when it comes to finding backlinks for your website, it’s critical that you know how to identify link farm sites. Indeed, link farms are becoming increasingly common, even though they don’t actually provide valuable services; with this in mind, it’s important to be aware of the different ways that you can identify these type of sites.

Of course, one of the most obvious ways to identify link farm sites is simply to begin with a quick google search. Indeed, if the sites you have stumbled across is a well-known name, you will likely be able to find online resources which point to this.

What’s more, a simple way to identify whether your chosen site is a link farm or not is to consider their policies for content publishing. If articles and submissions need to be approved before they’re published on the blog, chances are, the site is genuine; however, if the site offers automatic approval, it’s much more likely that the site doesn’t worry about content quality, which is a common indicator of a this backlink technique.

Following on from this point, you should consider whether the sites genuinely provide quality content or not. Indeed, if the posts on the site seem vague or unhelpful, or if they’re excessively short in length, this may be a further indicator that they are only being used for link farming.

As a final point, if you’re not confident that the site you have chosen is a legitimate site rather than a link farm, the safest thing to do is to head to a professional link building team for support. Link building professionals have contacts with valuable, genuine blog sites and networks and can provide useful, rank-boosting backlinks for your website – making it a far more valuable solution for your firm overall.

Conclusion

Numerous people have tried link farming sites – however, these are often poor solutions that can negatively impact your website’s ranking and are hence a poor-quality solution to consider for your own SEO and rank-boosting efforts. Therefore, we highly recommend that you consider the different solutions available to you – and, preferably, choose a more reliable solution for your site’s SEO boosting efforts, such as link building services, especially manual link building.

Fortunately, here at Outreach Bee, we’re proud to be one of the leading providers of top-quality manual link building alternatives; we offer professional link building services for numerous clients, and we could offer just the solutions you need for your own link building efforts too. So, make sure you’ve got the best solutions in place for your link building needs. Reach out to our team here at Outreach Bee instead, and we’ll do our best to help!