A link farm is a network of sites that connect to several other sites for the lone goal of growing link popularity. This means an internet site gets countless links to unrelated websites so they could earn reciprocal links. This is often termed as spamming and any website who pertains to link farms is reprimanded by elimination from a search engine's index.
Backgrounder on Link Farms
Link farms have been originally designed by website optimizers to take advantage of the Inktomi search engine's reliance on link popularity. It had been targeted for manipulation with the use of link farms mainly because that it was utilized by a few third party but popular search engines. The most famous search engines during that time - Yahoo! also used Inktomi results as a supplement to its unique directory search functionality. Link farms helped the stabilization of entries for ecommerce business websites having number of organic links from more stable sites.
Link popularity is used by most search engines to produce a ranking order for search results. On the other hand, right at that moment link farms came to be, the Inktomi engine was maintaining two indexes. The main index generated search results which have been limited to about 100,000,000 listings thus internet pages with few backlinks fell out of the index consistently. While the controlling of link farm exchange was informal initially, numerous service companies were eventually founded to handle automatic signing up, classification and link page updates to member websites.
The coming of the Google search engine paved the way for the use of a link weighting system called PageRank. The PageRank algorithm assigns more significance to links that it determines as a lot more important than others. Link farming had been applied to help member pages to increase their PageRank. This soon had become the subject of manipulation by devious webmasters who keep obtain inbound linkage but found strategies to hide outbound links if not absolutely avoid posting virtually any link at all to their sites. There came a require for link farm managers to use high quality controls and demand member compliance to rules that have been installed to ensure fairness.
As a result, various link farm products emerged much like the link-finding software program that determines future reciprocal link partners. This made possible the sending of template-based e-mails that offered link deals. Directory-like link pages are built for those websites intent on developing link popularity as well as PageRank. The link farm movement was actively countered by search engines as they desired to recognize unique properties connected to link farms thus filtering those webpages from indexing and search results. There was situations where entire domains had to be eradicated to avoid the potential influences of link farms on search results.
Link farm-influenced indexing decreased as search engines improved their chance to index far more sites. It became pointless for link farms to help sites retain their positions in key indexes. However, it continued to be a well known device to improve PageRank or perceived equivalent values. The Inktomi technology has since turn out to be a component of Yahoo! while the term "Link Farm" is now widely deemed as derogatory.
