SEO: Stay Away From Link Farms
A friend of mine, Jim, recently Emailed me, telling me about a friend whose rankings recently plummeted on Google. Apparently they hired a big fancy search firm out of New York to manage their search engine optimization and link building efforts. The rankings were going quite well for some time, then poof! They magically disappeared.
Below is an excerpt of the Email I just sent Jim. I thought you might find it interesting.
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From what I understand, the latest rounds of Google changes(Penguin & Panda) heavily targeted link farms and your friend was likely involved in such a link farm, whether he knew it or not. Google considers link farms to be inauthentic sources of traffic and they now seem to favor one-off links that are authentic and created over time. Slow and steady is the way to go when it comes to link building.
Below are a couple of red flags when it comes to link building:
1.) An abundance of inbound links occurring over a short period.
2.) An abundance of links coming from the same region or network.
3.) An abundance of links coming from sites that all link to each other.
4.) An abundance of links that come from irrelevant websites.
5.) An abundance of links that all use the same copy and link text.
6.) An abundance of links coming from “bad neighborhoods”.
7.) And more!
The video on the website of your friend’s search firm states “We have control over a wordwide network of blogs, websites, etc. creating an unfair advantage….” I think this pretty much sums up the fact that your friend’s search firm and their clients all got smacked as a result of creating and/or participating in a link farm.
STAY AWAY FROM LINK FARMS!
Creating content-rich, search-optimized websites is absolutely required to rank well, but this alone will rarely get you to the top of Google, unless you have no competition. You also need to get links from relevant and quality websites, directories and blogs, evenly over time. Taking matters a step further, the social media signal is carrying greater weight than ever with Google so you should also be thinking about creating an authentic buzz on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to help your site appear more timely and interesting.