What Is Link Farming and How to Avoid It

We all know how important backlinks are for a site’s authority boost. 

In that case, how about creating a number of websites that link to each other?

Shouldn’t that be an easy way to gain lots of backlinks? 

Well, it is, but creating websites only to receive backlinks is a form of black hat SEO, known as link farming, which can negatively affect your site.

Ever since Google’s SERP was introduced, there have been many instances where Google has had to update its policies regarding how it ranks or penalizes websites. 

While many SEO techniques have been prevalent and effective in the past, some of them are highly dangerous for a site now.

Link farming is one of them. You may have already heard that it negatively impacts websites.

In this article, we have elaborated in depth on link farming, its characteristics, purpose, dangers, and how to avoid it.

Definition of Link Farming

Before we get to link farming, we should describe backlinks first. They are hyperlinks placed on one website that lead to another. Their primary purpose is to recommend another site to the audience.

Meanwhile, link farming is a method of link building in which the owners create multiple websites for the sole purpose of gaining backlinks from them.

As you can understand, when a high-profile or quality website recommends its audience to your site, it benefits the latter by increasing its authority. Google also deems it a good SEO practice and may rank your site higher.

The issue is that some misuse this process by using websites mainly created to send backlinks to one main website. In this practice, the owner of the sites uses the quantity rather than the quality of the links to increase the page or domain authority of their main website.

How Does Link Farming Work?

In order to understand the working process of link farming, let us explain with an analogy.

You need backlinks for your website from other sites, and there are two ways you can do it-

• Either get high-quality backlinks from reputable and quality websites. Or,
• Get lots of backlinks from various sites created only to provide the links.

Now, you may not get nearly as many backlinks from the first method as you would get from the second. However, the ones you get will actually hold high value.

Meanwhile, on the second method, you would get tons of backlinks with little to no value.

Here, the second case is how link farming works. In the past, link farming actually worked as Google looked at the quantity of the backlinks to a site rather than their quality or relevance.

As such, many were attracted to this strategy. However, Google updated its algorithm later, deeming link farming a Black Hat SEO technique.

Spamming backlinks to a website from random, low-quality sites without much relevance now negatively affects the main site’s SERP ranking.

The Structure of a Typical Link Farm

Link farm owners usually get bots or AI to create a link farm automatically. These bots will make multiple websites for the farm in a very short time without putting much effort into making the site worth visiting.

Since the site’s only goal is to send backlinks to different websites, you shouldn’t expect anything worth your time. The bots will only add enough useless content to help them place the hyperlinks.

In most cases, the sites in the link farm will have irrelevant content from the sites they are sending backlinks to. As they are not human-made, this further guarantees that the site is irrelevant, as the AIs will only do as their programs and won’t put anything worthwhile on their own.

This lack of quality content makes link farm sites highly low-value ones. Hence, links from them hold little to no value in increasing a site’s link equity.

Now, a link farm holds not just one website but many of them. They sometimes link to each other in an attempt to increase each other’s value. Meanwhile, they can also send outbound links to other websites or one site in particular that is not part of the farm.

Why Did Link Farming Get So Popular?

If you didn’t know, link farming is almost as old as Google itself. However, the practice didn’t start with this search engine. It became relevant in 1999 when the major search engine was Inktomi.

As you can expect, Inktomi’s algorithms weren’t nearly as developed as those of modern-day search engines like Google. It ranked websites according to their backlink volumes. Of course, there are other ranking factors, but this one was among the most important.

The popularity of link farming skyrocketed because of its effectiveness in ranking. You see, Inktomi had a rule of only having a limit of 100 million listings. As such, only sites with many backlinks would stay in the rank.

Because of this limited listing rule, many websites with few backlinks (despite having quality ones) dropped out of the search engine.

Another factor made link farming even more attractive to website owners. Inktomi wasn’t obviously the only relevant web search engine at the time. There was also Yahoo! Apparently, link farming was also working in it, along with many other search engines.

As you can understand, link farming was one of the best SEO strategies at the time, if not the best. People hardly put effort into building high-value backlinks, as quantity easily outweighed quality at the time.

Even after Google became the most popular online search engine, link farming lingered for a good while.

This black hat SEO method also changed over the years, mostly to adapt to search engine changes and find ways around Google’s different policies.

Over time, Google found ways to detect the weight of backlinks and started using this method to determine a page or domain’s authority. It can also detect link farms fairly easily nowadays, except maybe in some cases.

In the next section, we have explained the negative aspects of link farming to your site and how using this method is almost useless nowadays.

Negative Impacts of Link Farming

Before 2011, link farming was frequent on Google. However, that year and the following year, Google released two of its most popular updates, the Google Panda and Penguin.

The former between them was to remove any low-quality site from the high ranks by prioritizing the quality of the website’s content. This helped domains with actual helpful content rank higher.

Google Penguin came a bit later, and Google penalized many websites due to link farming and other black hat SEO techniques. It was a dark period for link farmers, as their years of efforts became useless in a matter of time.

This update duo impacted 3% of Google’s search results right after its release. Later, Google Penguin also received ten upgrades. At first, it was only an algorithm extension. After frequent updates, it became part of Google’s PageRank algorithm in 2016.

As you can guess, these employed rules are still there. What does that mean for any website owner? Well, let’s list them down below-

If you, as a site owner, use link farming to spam backlinks to your website, be ready to get penalized by Google. Google will flag and punish not only the link farm but also any site trying to benefit from using its backlinks.

Since link farms only hold low-quality websites, inbound links from them don’t contain much authority. Since the quality of the links is more valid now, you can’t expect your website to gain much value from link farming now.

Audiences who visit your site through a link farm may not be interested in your content. A good backlink should be relevant, which most link farms won’t be.

Moreover, if an audience accidentally comes across a link farm and then uses the link to your site, they may deem the latter as low quality as the former.

Websites in a link farm don’t rank that high or generate leads, so you can’t expect much traffic to come your way using these spammy links, either.

The JCPenny Incident

Unless you have been active in the SEO community in the last decade, you probably haven’t heard of the JCPenny website case.

As one of the biggest retailing companies in the world for fashion and similar products, it got the attention of big-name organizations, including the New York Times.

In 2011, they published an article describing how JCPenny.com had been using backlinks from various low-quality and irrelevant websites. These sites were in many different niches and organizations, some utterly unrelated to each other.

It was especially on the dress section of the site.

Thanks to that article, Google penalized the website not long after. It was one of the first big blows that Google Penguin dealt on a popular and big-profile site.

Source: The New York Times, SEJ, Search Engine Watch

This incident caught the attention of many in the SEO community at the time, and it acted as a warning for everyone. Nowadays, no SEO expert will recommend any method that even closely resembles link farming due to its danger.

How to Avoid Link Farms

There are various means to stay away from link farms successfully. Let us discuss some of them below.

Checking the Structure and Content of the Websites

Avoiding link farms starts with identifying them. You can tell them apart from actual good websites by checking some details. For example-

• Link farm content can be low quality, backdated, AI-generated, plagiarized, repetitive, or not user-friendly enough. While none of these guarantee that the site is a part of a link farm, they still raise the chance.
• Link farms may usually have broken links.
• The sites may not look professionally built, and they often have only one or a few pages.
• There will likely be too many hyperlinks nestled in each piece of content on the link farm sites. You can also check their Linked Domain report using Ahrefs’ outgoing links tool.
• If you don’t find an ‘about’ page or find it but there isn’t much information about the author, it increases the chance of it being a bot-created link farm.

Ignoring Their PageRank or Domain Authority

There are many SEO metrics that showcase a website’s value. Ones such as Domain Authority (DA) or PageRank are trendy. However, there are ways to increase them using different underhanded means.

Link farms often use these tactics to boost their SEO metric values. So, don’t take these values as a standard to determine a website’s legitimacy. Instead, check the site manually to find out whether it is the real thing.

Looking at the Anchor Texts

Whether AI or human-made, link farm content may contain many generic or casual texts. The anchor texts will usually be like ‘read more’ or ‘click here.’

Checking Their Backlink Profile

Use Ahrefs Site Explorer tool to check the backlink profile of the site you are suspicious about. If you see it having a really low Domain Authority despite being at least a few years old, then it is a low quality site.

[If possible, add an image like this (backlink profile of a poor quality website or a link farm site]

Going for Proper Competitor Backlink Analysis

• You can use Ahrefs or Semrush to help you analyze your competitors and the backlinks they are receiving.
• Further research can help you find their best backlink sites.

• You can then request them to send backlinks to your site using blogs, forum posts, comments, etc. Creating better content than your competitor will increase your chance of getting quality backlinks.
• You can also mimic the procedures that your competitors followed to get backlinks from high-profile domains.

Getting links naturally like this is an ideal way to improve the link equity and value of your pages and domains.

Conclusion

While backlinks are one of the best keys to SEO ranking, using link farms isn’t the right way to do it. As a black hat technique, it will be very bad for your website. Inspecting a site’s various details can reveal many ways to know if it is a link farm.

The best way to get links organically is to write helpful and informative content that naturally attracts backlinks from quality websites. Of course, you will need to spend a significant amount of resources, time, and effort on getting backlinks manually, too.