Link farms were commonly used in the past (even Rand admits to having used them in this video), but when search engines were less clued in to them. Now-a-days using a link farm will more than likely get you listed at the bottom of search results, as search engines view then as an attempt to make your website appear to be more popular than it actually is.

Link building has become a prime way to get your website listed higher in the natural search results of the top search engines. The way it works in the form as traditionally intended is as follows.

Rand writes a story on using link farms, along with a video included. I also write an article on the basic theory of how incoming links work. I then link to Rands article on the same topic because I value his opinion and think that it may be of benefit to my clients also. 

Rand gets 1 incoming link from me to his article. Google, for example, would take this as a positive vote for Rand’s article, thereby increasing his rank in Google.

Basically this is what a link farm does, however on a massive scale. A link farm may consist of lets say 100 websites. If you subscribe to that link farm, then your website will become listed on all 100 of these websites, giving you 100 votes. This is a big difference from the 1 vote above. However, these days a search engine will take it further. Let’s continue to work with Google and from the example above. 

Google will look at my article and the content on it. It will discover that I am discussing “link farms”, “link building”, “search engines”, etc. Google will also take a look at all the other articles on my site and it will find similar keywords in these articles.

Google will then check out Rand’s article and discover that it has keywords such as “link farming”, “link popularity”, “rankings”, etc. and come to the conclusion that both articles are of similar nature. Google will also check out Rand’s other articles and determine that they are primarily about “search engine optimization”, which is highly related to “link farming”.

Google will value this link from my article to his article highly, as both talk of similar topics and therefore more than likely are of value to each other and to others who may be searching for this query.

The difference with a link farm, however, is that many of the websites located on a link farm either have no content, or have unrelated content to yours. This means that my link to Rand’s article may very well be of much more benefit to him and get him ranked higher in a search engines, compared to the 100 links that he received from the link farm that he subscribed to.

As well as this aspect, there are many more shortfalls when it comes to using link farms that you should be weary of. In short, you should not use any link farms as they are a good way to decrease your search engine visibility.

Check out this video on Link Farming to find out more:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Link Farming from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

In this video, Rand talks primarily about links that point to your website – that is – someone who has placed a link on their site pointing to yours, who hopefully has done so because they value your site highly and the content between your sites is relevant and rewarding to the visitors.

Links play a big role in increasing your search engine ranking as links are valued by search engines as ‘votes’. For example if I place a link from my website to Rand’s website then that would be looked at by a search engine as me placing a vote for Rand’s website because I like it so much.

In this video on Off-Site Over-Optimization, Rand speaks of the dangers of aquiring links that would appear un-natural in nature. For example if you engaged in purchasing a package to get you 5000 links for $50 (or something like that), this would most definitely cause a huge spike in links to your site (from the usual pattern), thereby triggering a spam alert to search engines, who will further investigate your website, and most likely penalize it as a result.

Check out the video below for further information:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Offsite “Over-Optimization” from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.