Identifying Link Farms
As of present the most viable strategy in search engine optimisation is through using relevant content and links. This is the reason why many SEO companies and SEO consultants have engaged or have placed most of their SEO efforts into building links or creating contents. There are several strategies that are being employed in link building in order to acquire inbound links for a website, however because of the popularity of link building as an SEO strategy many website owners have resorted to some black hat link building techniques. One of the most popular black hat link building SEO technique being employed by some unscrupulous people is the use of link farms.
Link farms are websites that have a long list of links that are neatly ordered but does not explain what the different links are, further the source of such links comes from submissions by other websites or are links from other link farms. The link farm website looks legitimate however submitting to such farms is very easy but with a very high consequence and that is being banned by the search engines for employing black hat SEO techniques. This is the reason why it is important for SEO companies and SEO consultants to be aware on the structure or feature of what a link farm is. Below are the different features of a link farm.
One feature of a link farm is that it lacks relevance, since it does not give any description about your site nor does it classify its links it does not give any sort of giving relevance to your site or links listed in the link farm.
Link farms do not use any common domain names rather it is placed in a deep directory which makes the domain name or URL longer. This is for reasons of preventing or making it harder for a search engine bot to crawl the link farm site.
A link farm will accept any link submission. That means they do not establish any criteria for accepting links or website.