Link Farms

Link farms were originally started by search engine optimisers back in 1999.

The purpose of these links farms was to take advantage of the dependence upon link popularity that major search engines had at that time.

Because search results were based upon the top one hundred million listings in search engine indexes, link farms exploded on to the net with the sole purpose of creating as many inbound links to websites as possible.

Link farms got their name from how they operated: farming links within, to and from one another’s websites.

Link farms were basically groups of websites that all linked to each other. Many of these were created by hand, but the overwhelming majority were created using automated programs and scripts.

Needless to say, search engines nowadays do not look very kindly upon link farms. Link farms, to a large extent are nothing more than spam, since their sole purpose for existing is to spam search engine indexes with specific links that have nothing to do with quality and everything to do with quantity.

This search engine spamming by link farms is often referred to as spamexing or spamdexing.

However, link farms should not be confused with link exchange websites. These sites exchange links individually with other websites, and because the choice is selective and not always reciprocal, the practice is not considered to be spamming.

When Google came onto the scene and really took the spotlight, search engine optimisers realised that Google’s ranking system not only required inbound links, but quality inbound links. They quickly adjusted their link farming system accordingly.

Then unscrupulous link farmers came along, and didn’t include outbound links like they should have. So link farmers had to spend more time and money creating quality control regimes and implementing them.

These days, link farms are still in operation, although many of them rely on using link finding software and hiring link finders, rather than allowing submissions the old fashioned way.

While this is more automated and less personal, it ensures that invitations to the link farms are fair and equal, without any dirty play involved.

Fortunately, many search engines view link farms as a negative influence on their search results, and so they use various bots and attributes to identify link farms to filter them from their indexing and search results.

Link farms initially started to give the not so popular and new sites the chance to be recognised by search engines and included in their indexes as quickly and high as possible.

But now that search engines are much larger, and have expanded their capacity to index 100 of millions of additional websites, link farms aren’t the necessity they once were.

Many search engines have crossed the five hundred million listing threshold, which renders link farms useless for their original purpose.

The importance these days is link weighting, and building specific inbound links and one way links. Nowadays, links farms are considered by many to be the scum of the internet, and the term itself is derogatory.