What is a link farm and how are they treated by search engines?
-
I notice one of my competitors who ranks prominantly has very odd looking backlinks. They come from MANY sites which all contain directories that look identical. Each site contains the exact same directory - only the design of the page is different. There is no theme or focus to the directories - they list everything from pencils to fencing. This competitor has very few links from outside of this directory but again it has MANY links from this directory. So my question is, does this qualify as a "link farm". And then, how do search engines treat "link farms?
-
Thanks, Barry! That last paragraph is rich and very helpful. Google won't likely look at an individual case like this because they are trying to fix this kind of problem by tweaking algorithms... Makes perfect sense. I'll likely make the report but set my expectation levels low.
Thanks to everyone for the great, quick feedback on my question!
-
If it is those sites that are being used to rank then you either level the playing field by getting on them, remove him from the sites or remove the sites!
Sticking in a spam report can't hurt.
And Blekko's probably discounted those sites as spam, they're quite good that way
When dealing with spammy competitors your options are limited, spam report or if you have a following you could blog about it and hope it gets in front of somebody in a position to make changes.
Realistically this sort of linking is the kind of thing Google wants to sort algorithmically, so won't see an immediate beat down on your competitor by reporting it; not sure what other options you have though
-
Thanks, Barry. Exactly the kind of advice I was looking for. : )
But seriously, is my only option submitting a spam report or are there other options? How do you all deal with competitors who use spammy tactics?
I notice Blekko doesn't rank this competitors site well at all. Actually, Blekko serps look like I'd expect them to if spammy tactics were treated as spammy tactics should be treated. Super clean serps (at least in my niche).
Anyway, any additional advice would be appreciated!
Thanks!
-
Or get on there too...
-
I first noticed these links about 6 months ago but I've watched this competitors site climb quickly over the last 12 months and I'm assuming they've had these links over 6 months. I had been advised that if these links were spammy Google would catch on and any benefit they had been getting would diminish. But as I said, it's been quite some time and they continue to hold their strong organic positions which is obviously a concern. So... what do you all suggest I do? Is it time to submit a spam report?
-
That's not a link farm
You just described a free directory
-
Technically a link farm is a group of sites that link to all the other sites in the farm. So A links to B & C, B links to A & C and C links to A & B.
Scale that up to 100 sites and you can kind of see what's going on.
Here's the Whiteboard Friday on it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-link-farming
What you're describing may be a form of link farming, if your competitor has a link back to each of those directories. If not then it's just a ****ty directory and probably not doing a lot for him or won't be doing a lot in the very near future
You could submit a spam report to Google, but probably not going to get dealt with straight away.
-
A link farm is one that gives any website a link for free. Its also called a FFA or free for all. No creteris is needed to list a website in such websites.
Link farms are considered a black hat technique in terms of Google.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Effects of a bad link linking to a image
i am getting a lot of links from wallpapers sites.. One person has created 1000's of similar sites that are linking back to my images. My guess is images do not pass link value positive or negative. But I am not sure what the potential effects would be. Does anyone know who linking to images might effect SEO especially when there coming from horribly low quality auto generated sites.
Link Building | | KentH0 -
Backlinks vs External Links vs Referral Links vs Outbound links
Hello all, I was just wondering if you could explain the difference between all the links above? I'm confused as they all seem to be the same or similar and I would just like to clearly know what distinguishes them from eachother. Thanks for your help, Jayne
Link Building | | NCOREGSEO0 -
Links from my Own Blog to my Own Website and Link Scheme
Hi There, I use my own blog to give advices and offer information related to my business service. Of course in terms of SEO my blog is useful not only to expand my brand presence but also to acquire long-tail traffic. I use to insert a maximum of one link with a relative matching anchor text in every article of my blog pointing to my own webpage. Said that, the questions are as follows: Am I involuntarily participating in a Link Scheme with my blog? And If so, how many links can I send to my own webpage ? Shall I limit the number of links to a minimum? Thanks a lot for your advices.
Link Building | | Midleton0 -
How many nofollow links should we build to have a natural link profile
Hi guys, As with many link builders we have been building lots of dofollow links for our site, so many that mainly our incoming links are dofollow. Some pages have 99.5% dofollow external links which I know is not very natural. In your experience in terms of percentage how much should you have in terms of nofollow external links in your link profile. I noticed SEOMoz has about 12-13% nofollow external links, shall I go with this figure? Thanks guys. David
Link Building | | sssrpm0 -
Do links within imbeddable widgets carry link juice?
I'm dipping my toes into infographic design. On of my desired outcomes is to gain links by having other sites embed my graphic. I'm considering using Tableau's interactive data visualization software to do so; thus creating a widget, embedding it on my blog, and including the embed code for others to post. Is it possible to include a juice passing link in such an infographic? I know its possible to include links inside the tableau graphic but not sure if they have straight SEO value. If these links are not juice passing would it be better to go with a simple image link that passes value?
Link Building | | JesseCWalker1 -
Build links through blogging?
Although my site is a wordpress site it presently has about as many static pages as blog posts. The site has a lot of directory links and is doing pretty good with a PR3 after about a year. When I first put the site up I had a well known blogging expert help me with the permalinks and a couple of other things and he said that with a blog there is no need to build links, it can all be done through natural link acquisition off of the blog posts. I was skeptical at the time because it seemed that a lawyer's site was something not a lot of people would be interested enough in to link to it. Now I am thinking about trying his stragegy, as 1 of my blog posts that I put up on a very topical subject immediately got about 15 backlinks. My questions are: Is it reasonable to try to build links just by posting frequent topical blog posts? If yes, should I have links in the blog posts to my home page, to internal pages, or both? \ Paul
Link Building | | diogenes0 -
.edu links
Hi mozzers, I've had some great success reaching out to many .edu webmasters. Often they are professors and such. My question is, i'm guessing during the summer holiday period, reaching out to these webmasters won't be so fruitful. I'm not in the US and was wondering when the US Summer holidays are for universities over there? Also, does anyone have experience outreaching to these webmasters over the holidays? Peter
Link Building | | PeterM221