The Link Directory: Just Another Form of Link Farm? - More Reasons for Linking Caution
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4. Too many irrelevant links can be seen as spam.
While you don’t see many link farms anymore, they do still exist. In fact, they can take the form of a link directory. If you don’t have organized, clear, and distinct categories of links, then your directory can easily be determined to be a link farm, especially if you have more than 50 links already on a page. Having a link farm on your website will be one of the fastest ways to get your website banned in the search engines.
5. You can lose PageRank or even be black-listed for linking to a spam site.
The consequences of linking to black-hat websites can be severe. “TrustRank” is a term recently trademarked by Google. In talking about TrustRank, Google says, “Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine's results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.”
In essence, TrustRank is a way to cut down on spam and filter out content that is not relevant to the searcher in order to bring them results they really want. What this could mean to you in the near future is that linking to a non-trusted site would deem your site untrustworthy as well. It is so important to be careful to whom you link. Even without TrustRank, which has yet to be used by Google, your PageRank can still be affected.
A company called Traffic Power was a notorious SEO firm that employed various black-hat SEO techniques, like doorway pages and JavaScript spam; so much so that the company and almost all of their clients were banned from the search engines. We have also seen sites that have linked to such banned sites lose their PageRank and positions in the results pages.
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