What is a link farm

Link farms are a collection of web pages or whole domains on the Web, which primarily serves the purpose to put as many links to other web presences as possible. The individual pages of such a Link farm are often very similar or identical to each other.

The establishment of such link farms is the so-called search engine optimization, or the manipulation of search engines, i.e. the site is linked to searches on one of the first places to be placed on the hit list.

This exploits the fact that search engines evaluate websites not only to its occurring on the side of the text, but also to referential links and anchor text. More referral links mean, as a rule, better placement in search results.

However, search engines take into account not only the number of referral links on a page (known as link popularity), but also their quality (from Google) by PageRank.

A similar technique also uses the Google bomb. One side is not appreciated, however, but have a special relation. The guidelines of most search engines warn of the creation of link farms. Violations can be the exclusion of individual pages or entire domains being penalized from the search index. For example,

Google now recognizes link farms and purposefully devalued those links. One other improvement – compliant with the directives – is the ability to rank a website that is called link building. This webmaster will contact other relevant pages in order to obtain from them a link to the web page.

Link farms are also known as file systems or directories of many links (on UNIX: symbolic links to the actual data, possibly on several levels). This is done to achieve more flexibility, or when data which should be in a fixed file system, will be presented under different names.