Link Farming: No Good Harvest - Link Directories vs. Natural Linking vs. Link Farms
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Is there an obvious way to tell the difference between a link directory and a link farm? And how do you avoid link farms? The question has particular relevance since it can be easy to fall into a link farm unintentionally. Alice Seba on Internet Based Moms mentioned a link program her friend Tara was once involved in. While she’d never participated in that kind of program herself, she “still didn’t realize it was a link farm. It was just a group of moms in business trying to find a way to help promote each other.”
The key, as with so much of SEO, is relevance. Say you’re a Star Trek fan, and you have a web site devoted to that interest. You can legitimately link to other fan sites, stores that sell Star Trek memorabilia, professional or personal sites for the actors in the series, and so on. These would all naturally be of interest to anyone visiting your web site. (Sorry, links to toupee sites would probably be stretching it, even for the Shatner fans).
What does not work is signing up with a company that promises you hundreds of inbound links if you promise to add the same number of outbound links. That’s a link farm. The links you get will probably not be relevant. So if you get an email that appears to have been automatically generated, and is requesting a reciprocal link exchange, be very suspicious. If you check out their site and it doesn’t seem to be remotely relevant to yours, run the other way. In particular, if they’re asking you for a link on your links page, and you don’t have a links page, you can bet this is an automatic solicitation, and they didn’t do their homework.
Now as it is, there are some who would argue that link directories are becoming obsolete. Some of our own writers, in fact, think they’re on their last legs. Many SEOs seem to think that at least DMOZ is still worth it, though, and that there are a few good directories still out there.
Incidentally, if you check your back links one day and find that a link farm is linking to you, don’t panic. Google won’t kill you for it. The search engine assumes that you can’t control who links to you. On the other hand, it also assumes that you control what sites you link to, so don’t link to link farms or other “bad neighborhoods.” (And it doesn’t do any harm to check the sites you link to every so often just to make sure they’re still there – and still relevant to your site).
Link Trading 
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