Talk:Link farm

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Meaning of link farm

I did not realize that the meaning of this phrase was as sinister as portrayed by this article. I've heard ... and used ... the phrase to refer to merely a page that is composed almost solely of links to other pages, which are often put up by innocent individuals as either part of a vanity site (indicating their interest in particular topics) or part of a topical resource (such as the lauded Cyndi's List of Genealogical Sites on the Internet). Is there an alternative term for these pages that appear similar in composition but are distinct in intent from link farm pages?

Thanks for the clarification/education ... Courtland {2005-01-27 USA ~8PM EST}

Contents

[edit] The article is incorrect

Link farms do NOT point toward a single, specific page. A link farm ONLY exchanges links between multiple sites.

Link farming was developed by members of Virtual Promote's Search Engine Forums to test the vulnerability of Google and Inktomi (now Yahoo!) to coordinated reciprocal linking. Many link farms are manually implemented, not automated as the article indicates.

I know because I was one of the people who helped to pioneer the technique. exact;y

User:Michael_Martinez

FOLLOWUP I've now revised the article. I'll have to look up links to Mike Grehan's articles and add them later. Michael Martinez 19:48, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Link farms include both cases: manually created groups of pages, and automatically-created groups of pages. ChaTo 08:51, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Restored paragraph about search engine response to link farms

I can agree that my original paragraph about PageRank was more of an aside, but the historical search engine response to the link farm phenomenon is well documented and worth mentioning. I have accordingly restored that paragraph. I would be interested to see why others feel it does not belong in the article.Michael Martinez 06:22, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question

I want to be sure I understand this. Say I run Website A, my wife runs Website B, and a mutual friend runs Website C. All three sites are information-based, not personal (let's say the subject is genealogy). They contain original articles, but also have links to many other genealogy sites. In fact, the majority of my pages are devoted to links and reviews of other pages and sites. The owners of these pages and sites find out I've linked to / recommended them, and they link to me in turn (and possibly to my wife and friend). My wife and friend have similar experiences with the people they have linked to. Is this a link farm, and if so, is it not considered good netiquette? --Bluejay Young 01:57, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The CORRECT definition of a 'link farm'

I don't have time to check the history of this article to see who mangled the core definition in the introductory paragraph. As one of the people who helped invent link farms, I know exactly what they are, how they work, and why they were created.

A link farm is a network of Web SITES (not pages) that, regardless of the "quality" of the content of the sites, agree to all link to each other. If you have 50 member sites, they each create a page with 49 links to the other members in the farm.

This fundamental definition should not be changed again, but if anyone tries to make it appear as though a link farm only supports one page, or that link farm members are only low-quality sites, such changes should be removed ASAP. There are other forms of search engine spam (such as doorway farms) where all the pages are low quality and are intended only to promote one page.Michael Martinez 04:36, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] An example

Since I dont really understand the subject, could you please place some links to Link Farms in "External Links" section?

Cute. I don't think you're serious. Jehochman (Talk/Contrib) 13:05, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] definition of a 'link farm'

I agree with Michael Martinez and I think the opening definiation needs to be changed.


"On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web pages that all hyperlink to every other page in the group."

The above statement is wrong in that it states the pages in the link farm "all hyperlink to each other page in the group." This is not so. You don't have to have fully meshed linking of pages for the pages to be consider part of a link farm.

I would also agree with Michael that it would be better stated that a link farm is a group of web sites not pages.

I suggest the above be changed to some think like the following.

"On the World Wide Web, a link farm is a group of web sites that interlink to each other using keyword rich anchor text. This is usually done for the purpose of obtaining higher rankings in the search engine results."

I noted keyword rich anchor text in the above statement as it is not considered a link farm if you use the web site domain name the hyperlink is pointed at for the anchor text. The search engines give alot of ranking weight to inbound links with the keyword you are targeting in the anchor text. Therefore when you don't use a keyword rich anchor text but use the domain name instead you will not receive a penalty or a ban as you make it clear that you are not interlinking for the purpose of farming link that will increase you search engine rankings.

For example a webmaster may have 10 websites that he owns and he may interlink them all and either use a nofollow tag in the link or use a domained anchor text. This set up would not be considered a link farm.

I also noted that a link farm is "usually" done for the purpose of getting high rankings but it could be done for the purpose of moving traffic between the sites. As the search engine algorymth can't decern intent it will still be considered a link farm.

I will leave this up here for 30 days and I request comments on this. After that time I will make it live if there are no objects. Bobmutch 06:50, 21 March 2007 (UTC)