How to Avoid Link Farms

Link Farms are extremely harmful to your site because if not careful and link to one of these farms, your site is risking to be banned by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Once you are banned, you can say goodbye to all organic search traffic.

How do you avoid a link farm?

1. Always make sure that the site is cached by google. If you are linking to www.asite.com, go to google.com and type in site:www.asite.com to see if google has this site indexed already. If you don't get results, take a note and check back 1 or 2 months later.

2. Take a close look at his/her site and make sure there are good and original content on the site. If the site is retail, make sure it is not pieced together in 2 days. If the site is a blog, make sure the blog has more than 20 entries, and each entry is well written and personalized. If a site has couple sentences, lots of google or yahoo adsense, and a page full of link directories, you will not benefit at all doing link exchange with this site.

3. Now try to find the page your link will be on by clicking on the links on the homepage. Usually it will be called something like "links", "resources", "friends", etc. If you can't find the link to the link central on his homepage. Email the webmaster and ask him to make sure you didn't overlook. If there is indeed no link pointing to the links page. DO NOT link to that site.

4. Avoid sites that have "web ring", "link ring", etc. link farms. It is too dangerous to link to these sites.

Now you have it, remember, it is okay to get a link from these link farms, incoming link from these farms won't hurt you a bit. However, if you link back to them. Don't get disappointed when you are banned.