What is a link farm, and how does it affect SEO?

All about Link Farm style link building

External linking is one of the most effective methods in off-page SEO, and we want to check what Link Farm is and what effect it has on SEO.

Link building has its principles, and you should not overdo it, you should know why link farms should be avoided.

The world of SEO and search results has undergone many changes from the beginning to today. The methods that may have been of great importance for ranking in the search results until recently, became completely obsolete with a simple change in Google's algorithm.

One of the strange ways to optimize the site is link building in Link Farm.

As you know, one of the important criteria for the ranking of websites is the number and quality of links that come out of them or are given to them.

Google was the first search engine to use the ability to link websites to determine their popularity and rank. After that, other search engines also considered link building as one of their quality criteria and allowed website managers to boost their site's reputation and rank by increasing the number of incoming links. Buy Website Traffic for built links causes them to be better recognized by Google.

But after some time, excessive linking caused a phenomenon called Link Farm.

Stay with us to learn more about this topic.

What is Link Farm?

Link Farm can be described as one of the Black-Hat SEO techniques in which a group of websites links to each other jointly or by paying money to a website to artificially and unnaturally receive inbound links.

The purpose of creating such links is to deceive the search engines, a website will be recognized as a popular and quality site in a short period, and as a result, it will be ranked high in the search results.

Many newbies think that Link Farms are the fastest way to increase incoming links daily. However, what remains hidden from view is that a link farm only increases the quantity of incoming links to the website and does not have a positive effect on the quality of the links.

Link Farm is a spam link-building method

The change in Google's algorithms in the past few years has made it impossible to get links from any site blindly as in the past. As a result, today, search engines recognize the use of Link Farm as a spam method and penalize the wrong site if found.

You may ask how search engines notice the existence of Link Farm or link farms. Well, the answer is simple. Sites that exchange with a link farm are easily identified by Google due to the high volume of outgoing links and their lack of thematic connection with each other. Google has become stricter in recent years and tries to display websites at the top of the search results that are high-quality in terms of content and, of course, respect the rules by applying various and numerous criteria.

Of course, it can be said that other search engines do not have strict rules about Link Farm, and Google, as the superpower of search engine marketing, has strict rules about Link Farm.

Why should we not use Link Farm?

We all know that links are divided into two categories: Internal Links and External Links. In the article The Complete Guide to Internal Linking, we have talked completely about Internal Links.

When you search for a term, search engines consider the quality and quantity of links received by website pages in ranking the results. As a result, at first glance, it is thought that more links means a stronger probability of being placed in a better position; But the quality and content of the websites that link to each other are as important as the quantity of links.

Links are divided into Dofollow and Nofollow categories. Follow links are like points that are transferred from a site to your site. As a result, the more follow links are referred to your website, the higher the probability of getting points. On the other hand, nofollow links have a different function, and receiving them does not directly increase your website's rank; But everything is not so simple, follow links can also hurt the ranking of the website under certain conditions.

What is link juice?

Google uses a measure called Link Juice or link score to measure the strength of external links. When a website gives you a link, it deposits part of its credit in the form of this link to your account and increases the credit of your website.

Currently, according to the relative knowledge of Google's algorithms, experts believe that no-follow links do not convey value to the destination site, and only follow links can increase the credibility of websites. On the other hand, as the number of external links increases, the value of each link (Link juice) decreases.

Additionally, the bulk of a link farm's content is a long list of hyperlinks pointing to other websites. Often these links are chosen randomly and completely unrelated to each other. This lack of thematic connection between them, together with the high volume of outgoing links of Link Farm sites, causes Google to penalize the websites that use these farms.

It must be admitted that link farms, although they are the fastest possible way to get a high volume of external links, but they bring you the worst and most low-quality links. Now the question is how to look for useful and healthy links.

What link-building methods should we use?

For newbies and beginners (which includes a large percentage of internet users), link farm sites are one of the main options to improve website ranking. Compared to other methods, this method has an easy operation and a very low cost, and of course, most importantly, it does not require a lot of time for management.

However, the problem is that after registering your website link in a link farm, you will probably see an increase in the number of visitors for a few days, but after a short period, the number of users of your website will decrease so much that even the number of visitors before using The farm site is also reduced.

Increasing the ranking of the website is also related to things like SEO in addition to link building. If you are sure of the SEO quality of your content, and you are looking for healthy and high-quality links for your website, there are methods that, although they require more time to manage and are not equal to the number of links received from farm sites, because Thematic links with your website are of much higher quality.

Using forums and creating links in the comment section of the content

Normally, they assign a NoFollow tag to the links placed on the websites, however, some websites or blogs do not limit the comment section (user comments) and use the Dofollow function for the links placed on them. As a result, commenting on this site or blogs leads to getting backlinks.

Forums and popular Q&A sites like Quora are the best places for link building. On these websites, every user who asks a question will immediately be faced with various and detailed answers along with various links, clicking on each of them will create a backlink to a site related to the subject in question. Of course, be careful that there are many forums for posting website links, and try to check these sites before receiving the link.

Link building for the site on social media

On the other hand, social networks with millions of active users 24/7 are one of the best places to get backlinks. Being on popular social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and creating useful content can bring you target users. In the meantime, placing the link in the text content of the posts will create inbound links for your website, which are of high value.

Also, your activeness in social networks and the ability to share website content in these networks are highly regarded by search engines, so sharing, likes and comments in these networks can play an effective role in improving your website's ranking.

In addition, conducting surveys, and contests publishing special discount ads on social networks, and including the website address for further reading will also result in receiving many backlinks for your website.

External linking by writing guest posts

Writing guest posts on other websites to include a website link, although sometimes it is met with a negative response and is time-consuming, but if it is possible, definitely use this method because you will create a new audience for your website.

Users who read your content will need it and will most likely visit your website if they see the link. At this time, if there is high-quality content on your website, new users will browse through the pages, and a percentage of them will visit your website later as repeat users. Thus, if you do this in a principled way, the impact of guest posts on the site's SEO is very large and useful.

Link building using infographics

Also, advanced linking using infographics for other websites is one of the external linking methods. If you get the chance to do this, be sure to use it, because images and infographics are usually more popular than textual content.

The effect of link farm on SEO

Link Farming is one of the relatively old methods that are made with the sole purpose of increasing the number of incoming links to websites and deceiving search engines. These farms try to lure newbies with new forms and advertisements every time and try to show their efficiency by providing temporary growth results.

However, in the last few years, with the updating of Google algorithms and other search engines, these sites have faced a lot of fines, and using them not only does not bring any benefit but also because of the high volume of outgoing links from them. And their lack of thematic connection with each other causes heavy damage to websites.

In the meantime, there are methods that, although they require more time and management, are more stable and create more quality links for you.