Link Farming – Just Say No!

It wasn’t too long ago when one of the acceptable practices in the world of search engine optimization to gain a rankings boost was to setup multiple domains and engage in linking back to the content on the primary domain. Known as link farming (a black hat practice), it was a way to easily cultivate rankings – at least until the search engines got wise about it and started penalizing the practice. Today, link farming is a practice best left in the past – you might get away with it for a while, but eventually the search engines catch on and penalize you for it.

There are two types of link farming that we still see out there today as practice of some seo services: Paying for links and Multiple Domains. The paying for links idea is still being practiced by some, though its on life support at best. This is the classic scheme where you just go around and pay other sites (who have at least some rank) to link to your content. It doesn’t take long anymore for the search engines to figure out who is collecting the cash and turn off the juice you get from those links.

The second practice, of buying multiple domains and linking back to content on a main domain, is something that is easily detectible nowadays. Not only so search engines look at the content on a domain, but many of them also look at the registrar data as well. So if you register 100 domains to provide links back to a main domain it won’t take long for them to put two and two together and de-rank you.

To put it in a nutshell, the only good way to get links is to earn them. Quality content is what gets the important sites (the ones that rank well themselves without resulting to trickery) to link back to you. After all, even if your link farming tricks were to work – once people get to your site, then what? You have to provide something of value to them for them to stick around. So many websites fail at this very basic fundamental – quality content that is related to the domain and/or search term the user queried against.

If you have quality content and people just aren’t finding you – don’t despair. Use tools such as Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms to make your site known. Let them discover you with a little help. Every time you post new content send out a short summary “Tweet” about it. You will find that over time the links will come naturally and your rank will start to go up without you having to resort to old-fashioned tricks that can hurt you more in the long run than they will ever help!