During a meeting with a client who I work with as a SEO Consultant for, I was recently sat in discussions with another Northwest website design, development and SEO agency who was going through some of the techniques they use and how they achieve rankings for there clients, and as it always does – the topic of link building cropped up. Now for those of you outside of the industry, link building is the process of building incoming links to your website!
The agency we were talking to had a large client base, and were clearly doing well for themselves. However whilst in our discussions it was mentioned they use domain names with just a single landing page with numerous links on to clients websites to get them in the index and they found it was highly effective method of link building and achieving rankings. Unfortunately I forget the exact name the company branded this technique as, that and I would not like to publically cause them embarrassment about using such a technique.
I instantly realised this was just a typical link farm technique and of no significant long term value to our clients, and in the conversations we subsequently had, they could not see why doing SEO the unethical (black hat) way is bad for there clients. I realised quickly this is an ideal blog topic.
Now onto the key facts, Link farms are pages on a website which are designed solely to pass PageRank onto other websites in a manner which is designed to scam the search engines. There are many different types of link farms, from Free For All (FFA) to the more conventional landing pages with 100+ links on, a site I saw recently had in excess of 10,000 links on the web page. These links are incredibly easy to get hold of, and you will usually find outsourced link builders will use this type of link as the filler links (Usually the PR1-2 links) to make up the numbers. Now why does Google dislike these links and potentially ban both the Link Farm site as well the site receiving the link?
PageRank is based upon the principle that each link is a vote, effectively with link farms you are voting for yourself – effectively corrupting the serp’s – a practise the search engines hate and as soon as they find out (and they do) your site gets removed from the serp.
Now during our conversation, the companies managing director did not seam to mind, as his company was just paid to get results and that is what they achieved as long as it is quick! However as a SEO Agency, we are representing your business above our own interests for short term profits -we care for your business’s organic growth and only use ethical link building techniques where all of our link building efforts are reviewed by webmasters not directly connected with our company and who may have an interest in your website!
