South West eCommerce

Search engines are cracking down on certain types of link programs. Even if you're an innocent member, you could find your web site penalised.

We have always said that increasing the amount of inbound links to your web site has a very positive effect on your search engine ranking and overall web traffic. This is because most search engines factor in "link popularity" when ranking your site.

But some web sites have tried to significantly increase their inbound links by joining links programs, often referred to as link farms.

A link farm is a system where all the members are linked to each other via a common set of link pages. The result is that all members have a links page with the other members' web addresses on them. Many of these link programs have several hundred or even thousands of members, so by joining you have almost instant access to hundreds of other web sites that point links to your site. This can lead to your site looking very "popular".

However, search engines quite rightly decided that this kind of artificial link popularity was not a real indication of how popular a site was. In fact, most search engines consider it cheating the system, as it can turn a very ordinary site that nobody would normally visit, into a site that appears popular, but their visitors wouldn't be interested in.

At first, the search engines decided to get around this by not only checking for the number of inbound links to a site, but the quality of the links. The more popular and relevant a site is that links to you, the better. For example, if you have a gardening site, search engines would be impressed by links to your site from, say, www.amazon.com (big site) or www.somegardeningsite.com.au (relevant site), but not so much from www.bobshomepage.com (unrelated and small, although any link is better than none).

Search engines still use this method, but now they are also penalising sites that participate in any sort of links program or link farm. They can do this by dropping your site way down their rankings, or drop your site from their database altogether. We have seen evidence of this with search engines such as Google.

The unfortunate thing about this is that innocent people can be caught out. Some people join these programs simply to get more traffic from the links (a strategy which usually doesn't pay off too well anyway). These people will find themselves penalised anyway, even if their intention or motive wasn't to try and fool the search engines.

The solution? The only worthwhile, long term solution to increasing your link popularity is to work on quality inbound links. That is, find good targetted sites to be linked from and contact them one by one to establish an incoming link. This way, you'll benefit from quality, targetted traffic, you'll build relationships with other businesses, and you'll impress the search engines with your real link popularity.

Stay away from the link farms.