Link Farm: What It Is and How You Can Identify It

One of the most common mistakes that webmasters and bloggers make is linking to link farms is due to lack of knowledge about what a link farm is and how to detect one. Adding a link to link farm on your website or blog can cost you a lot and thus you always have to be careful about which websites you link to. But what exactly is a link farm and how in the world can you detect one?

What is a link farm?
Link farms are websites that have tons of inbound links to increase their search rankings and PageRank. Such sites contain lots of links to unrelated websites. Sometimes there are also networks of link farm sites that link to each other.

Search engines are very strict to link farms. Most of them ban such sites completely from being indexed and displayed in search results. Furthermore, they will also lose their pagerank if they get banned by Google.


But that's not the worse part! Who cares if link farms get banned? The problem is that if your site links to link farms then it can get banned too or at least lose its PageRank! Yup that's right and that is why it is extremely important that you know what a link farm is and know how to properly identify one so that you do not link your website to it.

How to identify a link farm?
If you have not been serious about the sites that you link to then you really need to start doing so because they can have a great impact on your site's ranking. You must always review the site closely before adding a link to it. Here are some tips to help you identify a link farm:

• Site has lots of links - If you go to a site and see that it has tons and tons of links then you should immediately understand that it is a link farm.
  
• Low PageRank - Usually link farms get penalized by Google and thus lose their pagerank. Thus, you should be careful when you link to sites with PR 0. I am not saying that PR 0 sites are link farms but there is a higher possibility.
• Little or no content - Owners of link farms do not care about content. All they want is inbound links to increase ranking. Thus, don't link to a site if you don't find much content on the site.
  
• Poorly maintained - Link farm webmasters don't manage their sites very well. As mentioned earlier, links matter most to them and thus they don't spend much time organizing their sites.

Also remember that if a site seems like a link farm but has a good PageRank, then you should probably not link to it. Maybe the site just turned into a link farm and might lose its PageRank completely in the next update and also hurt your website's PageRank.

Remember, you never want your website to be linked to a bad neighborhood just like you don't want your kid to be playing in a bad neighborhood!

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