Building a Hub Site: Thinking About Linking - Don't Worry about Becoming the Dreaded Link Farm
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Many webmasters, instead of attempting to develop a hub site, express the unfounded concern that they may turn their site into an undesirable link farm. Nothing could be further from the truth. A hub site is not a link farm.
A link farm tends to be automated and its sole purpose is to gain links to exploit the search engines. Usually, the link farm demands a link back from all participating sites, plus all listed sites usually link to one another. There is virtually no concern for themes and topics with any of the links. Linking out to bad neighborhoods like link farms is always a bad move for any website owner. A hub site does not work like that in any way.
The purpose of a hub site is to link out to other related and valuable sites. It is especially helpful to link to authority sites in your topic area. Some great benefit accrues to the hub site's visitors, as they are able to find similar themed sites, already linked from the hub. Because of the high user value of a hub site, it gets rewarded in the search engines. The hub benefits through higher search engine placement in searches for the most important keywords and phrases.
Google and the other major search engines, are highly unlikely to consider your well themed out linking hub site, to be a link farm. On the contrary, they will reward your efforts, to provide a site with links to the most relevant and important sites on the topic. It is generally considered by most SEO professionals, that Google is especially fond of hub sites, and ranks them highly as a result.
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