What is Link Farming and why is it bad for SEO?
Link farming is a practice where multiple websites agree to link to each other in an attempt to artificially inflate their SEO rankings. Quite often, many of these websites are set up specifically for linking and do not contain any quality content.
While link farming may seem like a shortcut to better SEO, it usually leads to long term damage to your website’s credibility and rankings.
So, how do link farms work, and what should you do instead?
1. How Link Farms operate
Typically, link farms consist of low quality websites that lack genuine content. Website owners create a web of links among these pages, directing traffic to one another. This setup can include reciprocal links, where two websits agree to link to each other.
2. Impact on SEO
Google prioritises quality and relevance in their algorithms. Link farms can harm a website’s SEO by promoting low value links that do not contribute to meaningful traffic or user engagement. When Google detects link farming it can penalise or de-index the website, resulting in lower visibility in search results. Once this happens it can take a long time to regain a website’s previous SEO results.
3. Best practice for SEO
Instead of link farming, focusing on writing high quality content. Engaging in legitimate SEO practices fosters long term success and establishes authority, ultimately leading to better visibility and user trust. Quality always trumps quantity when it comes to comes to SEO. Although it will take longer by following best practices, you ensure your website’s growth is sustainable and avoids algorithm penalties.
4. Focus on good quality backlinks
Building natural, high quality backlinks is the best way to improve SEO. Earning links from authoritative websites will help improve your website’s credibility. Search engines value organic backlinks as a sign that your content is trustworthy and relevant, leading to better long term results. We support all the websites we design by providing a backlink to Dynamic Websites.
Dynamic Websites specialise in small business web design. We are based in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn and provide services throughout Australia. We understand what it takes to get a small business online at an affordable price and with the minimum of fuss. Along with designing websites for small business, tradies and NDIS service providers we provide online marketing services. Our online marketing for small business extends to Google Ads, Google My Business, Microsoft Advertising, search engine optimisation (SEO), content writing and, blog writing.
