What is Link Farm’s effect on SEO? + 12 alternative methods
In this article, we want to talk about the bulk purchase of links or the so-called link farm from Ravis advertising group. A dangerous technique that website administrators may use to increase their SEO ranking without knowing the consequences.
Link farming is a widespread and destructive method of black hat SEO techniques. which increases the ranking of sites by deceiving search engines and building artificial links. Of course, this rank increase is not sustainable.
The purpose of creating these links is to trick web search engines into falsely ranking these websites higher in the search results. Hence, link farms are considered a spamming method.
Considering the risk and dangers that this SEO technique brings, we intend to provide you with complete information about it here.
What is Link Farm Link Farm?
A link farm is a group of websites that directly exchange links with each other and are created solely for the purpose of creating and exchanging links. In the link farm, sites are not created with the aim of displaying and providing quality content and useful information to users, but only by exchanging links, they want to get a better rank in Google search results. The link farm is the fastest way to get high daily links, but today it is considered as a spam method and their use brings a heavy penalty from Google.
The effect of link farm on site SEO
In the past, creating a link farm was considered a smart plan and was important for search engines in determining the ranking of websites. But now according to Google’s standards and the emergence of the Penguin algorithm, the activity of link farms is prohibited. Because it has a photo application and may cause problems for the website from Google. Forced inclusion of many links can be detected by Google. In this case, Google can remove them from the list of sites or assign them a low page rank.
As you know, using black hat SEO tricks is not only not beneficial for your site’s SEO, but it is also possible that they can cause a lot of damage to it. In fact, Link Farm is one of these black tricks, which is used to increase the site’s rank, but it will undoubtedly result in a heavy fine from Google.
The amount of the fine depends on the size of the link farm and its scope. If you use extensive link fields for ranking, it is possible that your website will be removed from all Google pages.
Membership in link farms is paid and you have to pay a fee to build their backlinks. If you think that paying this fee will significantly improve your site’s ranking, you are very wrong! Because Google will eventually realize that these backlinks are artificial.
Due to the fact that the backlinks of these farms are often unrelated to the content of your site, they can greatly reduce the value of your site’s domain and cause your ranking to drop in the long run.
Alternative methods instead of link farming
You can help increase the rank of your site by building quality links and backlinks and use alternative methods of link farming. Now that you have noticed the harmful effects of link farms on your site, it is better to use alternative methods of link farms. There are many effective ways to build backlinks, which we discuss in this section.
Authentic blogs
To do this, first we create a blog and then we upload our good and optimized content in it and after the blog’s credibility increases, we put our desired link in them.
Recently, reputable sites such as virgool, Medium and reddit have created a platform for writing content, where you can get backlinks by creating an account and writing content. But keep in mind that the content you write should not have an advertising aspect and is only for the purpose of getting backlinks. You can write a good content of 500 words or more and put your website link in the middle of the text. A blog backlink is one of the most effective backlinks that can help your site’s visibility. Try to increase the value and credibility of the blog by doing SEO methods so that the links you receive are more valuable than before.
Guest post
Guest posting or blogging as a guest is also a good idea to create backlinks from reputable sites. In this method, you should write a useful and high-quality content and then publish it on sites that accept guest posts. And then give a link from it to your site.
It is better to put this content on a site that operates in the same field as you; In this way, Google will trust you more and you have exposed the content to your users.
Among the other benefits of writing a guest post, you can mention better brand introduction and effective communication with colleagues in your business field. It even benefits the host website; Because you have produced a high-quality and useful content for their site.
Social network profile
Don’t neglect social networks to get useful and valuable backlinks. Creating an account in various social networks automatically creates backlinks for your site. Networks like Instagram provide the possibility of inserting a link in the bio. In media such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, you can also put the link to the site in each post as well as your account profile. If you use this method, try to create backlinks without anchor text and only with the domain address. In addition to organically creating backlinks for your site and increasing its credibility with Google, this method can also send a lot of traffic to your site.
Advertisement report
A great but not free way to get quality backlinks is ad reporting. You can spend the money you spend on buying backlinks to order an ad report. Advertising reporting is the process of creating a quality content that indirectly introduces your products, services or brand. The ad report is permanently published on popular news sites along with the link to your site for a fee.
Fix broken links
In this method, first, using a tool like Check My Link, you should find a list of abandoned links related to your business that exist on other sites. Then produce a suitable and valuable replacement content for that broken link. Or, if there is already optimized content on your website than that of Anchortext, introduce it to the site manager. Then email these sites and interact with their owners, here you should compliment their site and claim favor.
Warn them that there is an abandoned link on their site and show them its address. So ask them to give you a backlink for this. Probably the site administrator will be very pleased that you found a broken link for him and found a more useful alternative for it and will cooperate with you. To increase the probability of a positive response, you can go to the posts of that site and leave positive comments for them before expressing your request.
Podcast
When you prepare and publish a podcast, the podcast publishing site will ask you for your social media and website address. Also, on the page of the site that publishes your podcast, it will add backlinks to the pages of your site to give a complete introduction of the publisher. Similarly, you can get backlinks and good traffic from reputable and famous sites.
Web2 sites
Web2 sites are a new generation of sites that were introduced after normal sites. Unlike web1 sites where one person produced the content and placed it on the site and users could only read it, in web2 sites a two-way interaction is created between the content producer and its readers. Since Google is always looking for user satisfaction, it clearly prioritizes web2 sites over web1. Also, it is easier to create content on web2 sites due to their nature.
Business directory
Apart from blogs, business directories are also a good option for getting backlinks. Various jobs and businesses are introduced in such websites. Just find these directories and introduce your website in them.
Infographics
Today, users’ desire for visual content has increased and more attention is paid to this content. Infographics are actually the same graphic content that can convey complex information faster and easier and in a large volume to the audience through images. You can use this method to produce your content and by producing and publishing infographics on social networks, persuade users to share them with others. You can also introduce your infographic as a guest post to reputable sites and in return, while introducing your site, get backlinks from them. In this way, very soon you can see your image content on various pages and get backlinks without being linked to the farm.
edu academic backlink
edu sites are very important from Google’s point of view, because only universities can have such a domain, and as a result, from the point of view of Google’s algorithms, an edu domain that is related to educational and academic institutions has high credibility. Getting links from edu sites is a very difficult task; But with a little skill, you can get powerful backlinks from them through tools like ahrefs and moz or by paying people who can build links on edu sites.
Wikipedia backlink
In this type of linking, as the name suggests, you get a link by participating in editing Wikipedia content. Although the link you receive is a nofollow, it is valuable. Because linking in Wikipedia is very difficult. There are sites that came from page 8 with a Wikipedia link to page 1 and 2 and became among the top results of Google.
Forum backlink
In this way, you can create valuable links by joining various forums and publishing your website link among their content. The thing is, do not insert your link at the beginning, because there is a possibility that your messages will be deleted and even the user account you created will be deleted. Instead, you can ask a question and after the participation of people in the forum, put your website link in it.
Other black hat SEO techniques
Black hat SEO techniques don’t stop at link building. There are many other things that website owners and people who consider themselves SEO experts do that cause problems for your site. In the following, we mention two other black hat SEO techniques.
Keyord Staffing
When it comes to keyword repetition, the main idea behind the scenes is that the more keywords you include in your website page or article, the faster your site is likely to be found. But in fact, as website users began to ignore sites that displayed keywords too much, search engines also began to penalize sites that did this.
Cloaking
Another black hat technique is called cloaking. This technique shows the visitor the content they want to see, but haven’t clicked on. Or it works by showing users one article and search engines another. The purpose of this work is simply to deceive the search engines.
Fix wrong use of link farm
If you have created a website for yourself and used this method without knowing the dark aspects of “link farming” with the aim of improving and strengthening your site’s SEO, do the following before Google recognizes them and their malicious impressions:
• Stop all activities and actions related to link farm.
• Find the list of all exchange links and PBN that Google has registered for your website by referring to the Links section in the search console and then clicking on the EXPORT EXTERNAL LINKS button and selecting the More sample links option.
• Cut off and remove all the links that you got with this method using tools called Disavow.
• Start linking with some valuable informative and useful articles on reputable sites and get backlinks for them with reliable methods.
• If you have been penalized by Google, do this step as well. Otherwise, the previous actions are sufficient. In this case, after performing the above actions, you should refer to the errors section of Google Search Console and after making sure that the related errors are fixed, request their re-indexing (by clicking on the address of the desired page and then using the Inspect URL option and Click on the button REQUEST INDEXING) to submit to Google for review.