"Old McSpammer had a farm, e-i-e-i-oh,
And on that farm he built some links, e-i-e-i-oh
With a backlink here, and a backlink there,
Here a link, there a link,
Everywhere a link, link..."
You get the idea. Back in the day, building your own network of sites designed to link to each other and build link popularity was an easy way to help boost your rankings. Nowadays though, link farming is an almost surefire way to get yourself into some big trouble with the engines.
Watch this week's Whiteboard Friday to learn why link farming is a bad idea, and how the engines are so quick to identify it.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Link Farming from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Here's what confuses me about link building, don't buy links and don't link farm. However, every time I research backlinks I find ALL the top ranked sites have either bought links or have some form of link farm! Now, if I can work this out quite quickly why haven't the search engines. So here is my question, what negative effect, if any, does following the link buying/farming strategy have? It seems that the upside outweighs the downside.
PS I agree with Randfish's arguments about these link building strategies, but having the moral highground doesn’t pay the wages.
The problem comes down to being able to determine it algorithmically without wrongly penalising sites.
If you can figure that out, I'm sure the search engines would be very happy to hear from you =)
The other problem may be your industry. If everyone's doing it penalising them all isn't going to make a difference as they'll all be hit equally, so the search engines may just be causing work for themselves.
Plus the bigger you are the easier it is to get away with.
Thumbed up anyway because I'm sure there are super smart people working for the engines who should be a lot closer to figuring it out.
I think one of the main concern is the worth of your time. What I mean is if you build a proper backlink towards your site, you've just build a long lasting value (in theory), and don't have to worry about any change in search engine algorithm.
On the other hand, hit and run techniques used by black hats my potentially yield some results at first, but you have to live with the knowledge that whenever Google decides that this is officially wrong and start to battle real hard against it, all your efforts will be wasted and you'll have to start all over again, possibly with a handicap coming from a suspicious record of activity.
I'd rather build 1 link that will still be valid or gain in value in 1 year, 5 years or 10 years from now, than investing in a link farm network that will maybe survive until the next algorithm update.
That said, I do understand your frustration and practical argument.
The thing is buying links and link farming is not their only strategy.
If it were: it would probably already be detected unless they are doing a really good job hiding it.
Paid links are a little harder to spot I would think.
They generally are not going to penalise a site for these tactics they will instead just make the links worthless. To do a really good job on a link farm is not really worth the time.
As Rand said in the video you still have to build links to the farm pages. =(
Nice job explaining how Link farming works (or used to).
What should be mentioned here is that with all the great information you are able to glean from Linkscape, it makes it easy to understand how simple it is for Search Engines to identify connection trends between sites and adjust for them.
Way to go "Scooter"
Oh man... I really hope that nickname doesn't catch on after yesterday.
Ha. Consider it your official nickname for SMX. See you on Monday.
Someone is going to have to get a new T-Shirt!
LOL
"Scooter doesn't follow me on Twitter."
Rand, My wife wanted to knowif you got to ride in an ambulance?
Answering for Rand. No; a friend took him to the ER. A friend in need is a friend indeed!
Nice video. Completely wrong, but nice video. Link farms work, ppp works and dupe content gets indexed. If you don't believe either of those, you are kidding yourself.
Now is it higher risk? Sure. But who cares really if you are working on your own sites. Plus, build enough of them and it really doesn't matter in the end. Would I use them for a client, most likely not because the client wouldn't want to see that.
However, they raise my pr, raise my rankings, and still work. That's just fact and you can't stick your head in the sand.
i agree.. tho i think rands idea of what a link farm is(was) is out of date... most people nowerdays call it a content network or social media profile!
Fine.. but I can see more and more donot's rather than do's videos...
I hope you'll give us more do's Rand! :)
have a good weekend!
M
Usually learning what not to do is just as valuable as learning what to do.
By not enganging in wrong or useless practises, you don't just save yourself a lot of potential trouble in the long run, but you also save time which is better spent on the stuff you should be focussing on ^^
I have also seen this work. More importantly, if Google really did penalize sites for doing this, then it would be very easy for me to get competitors penalized by creating a whole bunch of mini-blog sites on their same C block and linking to them.
Any time someone talks about a site being penalized for things that a competitor could easily do, it just doesn't jive with me... There's not enough solid testing and experimentation in our industry which is shared to the public (save SEMJ maybe). We need real information rather than hypothesis and regurgitation. =/
It also seems that if the links are deep links that are coming from the "link farm" or "network", they seem to have much more impact on rankings and PR push.
Just an observation, not sure why though when the follow the same tactic... and logically would appear to suffer from the same interlinking issue/benefit manufacturing concern.
Can this harm you (ie penalty rather than time/money wasted) or will it just not help?
I'll give you some real world examples of my 'link farming' (I prefer the term feeder sites =])
1) We have a product that affiliates sell, affiliates obviously try to rank for the brand terms so we've introduced sites like brandname.tv where we host all our videos in an effort to push other sites as far down as possibleon the brand.
This content is unique and the site is worth looking at on it's own, is this part of a link farm?
2) We have a sister company that is also an affiliate and it ranks highly for brand terms too. All the registry details are the same but hosted elsewhere and the push of the site isn't specifically just to sell our product.
Would this seem like part of a link farm?
3) We have sponsored numerous events, each of which we have a related domain name for and have placed content up about the event, but they all link back to us and sometimes to other related events.
It's not on the main site because the amount of information provided on each event would bloat it and remove the focus from buying the product.
Would this be considered part of a link farm?
Or am I mis-understanding slightly and it's only sites that are 'shallow' that are classed as being part of a link farm? Although I appreciate what you're saying about creating more work for myself having to promote these other sites.
well said, i was thinking some thing along those line, especially if you have quality microwebsites, then to me for sure you will get link value, untill unless you start putting too many links,
i have some micro blog which i blog on regular basis and i tend to link some post back to main website and across other related websites as well. i am not doing any thing wrong. am i?
BOTTOM LINE EVERYONE: You gotta read between the lines and see through everyone writing in the comments here--basically nobody here has ever done so called "black hat" seo, and everyone is just regurgitating how potentially bad it is, including Rand, who probably hasn't participated in anything close to a link farm since the Florida update 6 years ago. So hmm...Waiting for Rand to post a comment, denying that the last time he did anything black-hat was 6 years ago. But that's not going to happen--why? Because he has to drink the Google Kool Aid with a blog/website as popular as SEOMoz.org.
Some edumucation for everyone: you mainly have to worry about a manual penalization--i.e. exactly why Rand is so gung-ho white-hat. Google will probably never be anywhere as close to as smart as people on this comment wall and throughout SEO forums make Google out to be. Setting up vast networks of sites on unique C-Class IPs untrackable through registrars that link to your money site with unique content on these sites is extremely easy. Powering these sites in your link farms with links from the millions of UGC sites is easy. Putting unique content on those too is easy. Is google really that good at finding similar content--no, not at all. Will they ever be, probably not good enough.
Anyway, the point is simply that 99.99% of everyone chitter-chattering about the dangers of blackhat-SEOs have barely done any SEO themselves. The SEOs that drink the white-hat kool-aid and blog a lothave all done tons of "black-hat" seo, but smartly don't talk about it publicly. Either that, or they've gotten to a point where they only do SEO for sites that already get millions of visitors a month, and they can just advise these sites to write content targeting the appropriate keywords, and they'll naturally get linked to with the correct anchor text, with close to ZERO work by the SEO firm. So ultimately, there is a huge divide between these super pro SEOs who barely do any SEO work besides some basic keyword research, and real SEOs that do what it takes, combining white, gray and black hat methods all while keeping their clients out of trouble and actually producing quality for the net, but with a few spammy pages that never hurt anyone--not even the rankings of the money site.
MORAL OF THE STORY: INTELLIGENTLY TRY THE MOST BLACKHAT STUFF YOU COULD EVER DO AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
Could you see the same problems that link farms have applying to web design firms looking to build links through backlinks on their clients' sites? All of our websites are hosted on the same 2 or 3 servers, with the same WHOIS info, but they're complete, legitimate online businesses rather than spammy sites.
Would we be better spreading our sites across numerous servers and with the client's WHOIS info rather than our own? And would switching to that system raise flags on Google's end?
hey Stefan, of course it would, dont have any doubts about it... so long as you dont overdo it and start interlinking like mad between them all, the links from your clients sites would have a stronger value within your managed network of client sites than if they come from a. the same server, b. the same IP address d or c block and c. if they r register by the same person, as Rand well rightly points out.
So if you really have genuine and legitimate online businesses behind each website hosted, in my opinion, that move would indeed bring more value to your links (for the purpose of interlinking), the downside would be the logistical hassle to try and manage all your clients domain name services from different registrars, email addreses, servers, etc... it's more practical to just have all your clients hosted in the same server, as I am sure you agree...
Yes if we could have some DO tips in this area that would be great. I'm just in the middle of developing a load of sites to do this!!! mmm what now?
Great job Rand! But, hey! IP address "block" never can be greater than 255, and in practice it always less than that. Or, was it just a joke? ;)
Link farming works look at how well shopstyle.com ranks for anything
What about submitting your site to directories? Many directories are owned by the same person. Some are blatantly obvious, while others are completely different.
Would it produce harm for example, if you are linked from 100 directories, and out of those 100, 20 were run by the same person on the same host/ip etc, another 10 run by another person, and so forth?
After watching this WBF it would seem so.
hmm... i have a number of side project domains which could find this profitable if i followed the model that some of these sites are starting to use, where they are filled with adsense to help pay for the hosting/content...
isnt it the same when a large company such as iVillage buys a whole lot of little microsites and links back to their site???
So the post starts by saying it's a surefire way to get in big trouble, and then now you're saying "it's rare the engines penalize for this" . Geez, no wonder my head hurts.
Redirecting the "mini-sites" to the main site is a very good technique to gain authority, after you've built up those mini-sites with whatever links you've obtained.
Taree's comment about analytics and adsense made me raise an eyebrow - and sure enough, my local competition that is using the link farm technique doesn't have either installed on any of their inter linking sites. I have no idea how they're tracking anything, other than using log files, but nearly everyone of their sites ranks at or very near the top of google.
There's a lot of great discussion here, but did I learn anything? Yep. This one's still up in the air.
I agree that the introduction to the post where it says link farming is a "surefire way to get you into trouble" is misleading. As Rand clarifies, you won't get into trouble, but those links just won't pass much (if any) value.
It seems common sense that search engines can easily detect "link-farms" in their algorithms. So, those links from the mini-site to the main site won't pass much value while the mini-sites are still active.
What you are suggesting, 301 redirecting the entire mini-site after building it up, wasn't covered in this post or video. Sure, if you build some decent links to the micro sites, then 301 redirect the entire site to your main domain, there will be some value passed.
The thing is, consider all that work you put in to create the mini-site, then build links to it. It is believed that there is some link juice loss through a 301 redirect (sorry, can't find reference), so I'm wondering, wouldn't it be a better use of time to focus on content development and link building just to the main site and forget the whole micro-site thing?
I guess I should be more careful about parsing the meaning of "trouble." I worry about this more from a time wasted perspective (which, in our startup world, is probably the biggest source of "trouble") rather than a "you'll get banned by the engines" perspective.
Thanks for the feedback - I'll try to be more diligent on parsing these in in the future.
It seems like Google is coming down on this harder than ever.
I'm dealing with an interesting one at the moment, a person came to me who offers a service where he registers the users domain, sets the blog/site up and ads his Adsense to the site which he keeps a nominal 10% to cover costs and the user gets 90%
Great service, used mainly by the non-tech savvy members of his forum whom he's known for years. They pay zero out of their own pocket, don't have to worry about domain registrations, site setup or monetization and earn some money on the side.
Well recently ALL sites on the server got wiped off the face of Google, i'm talking ObscureName.com ranks #227 from #227 for a search of "ObscureName" and is being beaten by a stats page on a domain with 11 backlinks that just links to it.
90% of the sites don't link to each other (some do, the users are friends on a common forum). I've spent days looking for issues, and it looks like it boils down to this simple equasion:
1 Person + 200 Domains + 200 Adsense ID's + Same IP = Penalty.
Either way it's really hurt a lot of "Soccer Mom" type people, who were earning some extra money and have done nothing wrong.
That's another thing that "Scooter" aka Rand didn't go in to, is Google Accounts namely Adsense and Analytics ID's being used to connect the web property dots and identify people/patterns.
It's easy to register 100 domains and get different class C IP space, but not so easy to pickup 100 Adsense accounts.
I have seen a lot of evidence to suggest Google is using this data in some fashion.
Good point regarding the adsense and analytics ID's, Ive always though this would be easy for google to do. Even if you had different accounts they could track IP address's used to login and link sites that way.
If you have a way to register 100 domains and get different class C block, you'd be able to pickup 100 Adsense accounts too. I used to work for a company that used several Adsense accounts. Obviously it wasn't easy, but there was [is] a way... I'm not saying that it's all good to link farm, I'm just saying that it's still possible in most cases.
RE: blackhat - as tbutcher1980 mentioned, obviously there are some tactics that no hat would use for their clients, but would eagerly implement them to their sites, even just for the experiment's sake.
Also, blackhat mentality is not long term. It's about maximum gains in shortest time [until next algo update] and moving on to another project once the current is out of G's index.
oops. double post...
To answer a bunch of questions on this front:
Hope that helps!
Here is my belated take on the topic.
Buying hosting and domains from a variety of hidden sources is possible. You can get on a number of class C blocks, you can register in different names*
Remember that Google is a registrar, and people say they use this information to see even 'locked' domain ownership information.
So, say your 'clean' on your hosting and domains. Now you have to manage a bunch of sites, and you have to make these sites pretty darn good in their own right. How will you achieve this?
Scrape content and articles from elsewhere? Make a social site so that others write for you? Hire college kids to write for you? You better get cracking on this, because you want the nodes in your link farm to pass along some juice.
On the subject of juice, you need to get some links to your new farm. Links are valuable; people know they are of value, so how are you going to get those links? Remember these links can link to some or all the nodes in your farm, but that is going to look suspicious, right? Maybe just build a lot of links, and get that farm ranking!
You also need to be careful, because Google can see the interlinking structure between your sites. Maybe you should go for 1000 links, from quality sites, and divide them up among you’re the nodes in your farm.
You want to keep the farm fresh, because everyone likes farm fresh eggs, right? So keep working hard on those sites, keep up on your content, and you should succeed.
So.
Given all that link building, content writing, and keeping your site fresh, you gotta ask yourself: Why not just do all that work for your main site? That's a lot of resources, diluted, instead of concentrated.
----
PS. Don't web and seo people who put their link on all their client sites get the benefit of the link farm? That's one reason designers linking to their site from a client sites is a pet peeve of mine.
PPS. Same goes for some people that put link pages (usually 'hidden' to some degree) on their client sites. Blech.
----
*Canterbury Tail, and Hotslots Nugyen are a couple of my favorite persona's for signing up for free magazines.
I personally feel that beyond even the "link farming" risks, from a practical point of view, it's a lot of work to setup.
I just feel that building real good links is much easier and much more rewarding (and les costly when you ocnsider that some people will purchase different C class IPs for each domain of their farm...)
I like to implement SEO tactics that I know won't turn agains me in the future (or at least with extremely low probability rate)
Hello, its nice topic, But can anyone transprit the video into wording and post here. I am unable to watch and listen the video due to lack bandwidth. So its my urge to all members please post video transription.
Hi, Really great topic
Could you answer my query
For example if i run a successful website design company and have a large number of clients of which i include a "design by www....." notice at the bottom of their websites would Google see that as a link farm?
Thanks Darren
It's important to define Link Farms as a group of unauthoritative sites linking to another.
Obviously, there's nothing wrong with registering a bunch of domains, building content-rich, frequently updated, websites, and having them inter-link.
Just take a look at all the blog networks out there, they all have this same set up. B5 Media, for example, has every one of its blogs linking back to B5's corporate site. And has that corporate site been hit with a penalty?
No.
Link farming is fine, so long as you can create authoritative sites on each domain you bring into the farm.
Rand,
Saw your tweets as your ER visit unfolded. Glad to see that you made it out with only a limp.
With regards to your WBF, we have a bunch of subsidiary companies at work and were debating linking them all together. There's a legitimate reason to cross link these domains because they're all owned by the same parent company.
While our scenario seems different to me in my mind, I'm not sure the search engines would agree after seeing your webisode.
Get well soon :D
Linkscape seems to be an awesome tool. I think a tool that takes this discussion into consideration would be amzing and very useful. From Term Target it seems you can easily tell what each site is about. Then you could use linkscape to find links and also take into consideration where the links are within the page. The new tool could give more weight if the link is in the body vs. footer along with if it is a relevant page. I know you probably do not have IP access and all that so this may be as far as it could go for not, but I think it would be a great "next step" for linkscape.
This brought to my attention of hosting client's websites. While most of us host our client's website under our server with a shared IP, perhaps that can also play a role if damaging our ranks in the search engines.
Great Video Keep Up the great work.
I'm from Japan and in the Japanese SEO world, the biggerst word for SEO is "Seo 対策(literally strategy) ". It is because just the word "Seo" shows a bunch of English sites on google and they don't want that.
Anyway, some guy got #1 on Google for that phraze recently(I think it was in February) and still #1 and he became kind of famous in the SEO comunity. He says he works alone. And you can tell easily that is true from the site.
He officially says he owns 100 different weblogs from different free weblog service sites (like wordpress or blogger or that sorts in English speaking world). And he has only 10 or so other domains hosted in the same server.
Hes sites(blogs) are titled like "How to do SEO" or "Let's do SEO" or things like that.And he interlinks his blogs each other.
I checked his blogs bacllinks, and they don't have any back links other than from the other blogs.
Of course, his main site gets backlinks from other sites too, like directories or blog commenting etc. However, his backlink numbers are 5000 or so, while other seo big companies' sites have at least 10000 backlinks.
The only resonable way to see "why" his site is #1 is that his "blogs" are so related to his topic(seo), and coming from different c-calsses (because they are free weblog services) and all linking to his main site, that Google thought his main site was the best one for the topic.
It doesn't seem to matter the blogs are linking to each other. At least at this point...
I don't have time or energy to make 100 weblogs though...
Doesn't seem that any Search engine is perfect in detecting these. Every one knows the search engines got good at this sort of detection, but many still slip by - its a very hard issue to isolate and devalue. I mean look at paid links for instance, many of them still do well because either not enough people are snitching them or, the SE detection methods only go so far...
Just saying...
In my opinion link farming is wayyyyyy too much work and is not worth the effort. Unless you have a huge amount of resources it never really pans out. Your much better off doing some real link building.
Well I don't agree with link farming I disagree with saying it doesn't work....well in a few cases perhaps.
I'm currently working with a client who's competition owns around 15-20 different sites within the niche. They all have unique content etc etc and link back to the main site. They're not trying to hide it and it's clear as day to detect. These sites have held top 10 rankings for years, and are still to this day buying paid blog posts on the spammiest of sites.
I'm aware that Google doesn't catch everything so it could be a matter of time, but for the past few years they've been thriving on link page recip's, buying blog posts and farming and it has worked beautifully.
So it's been a pain in the ass so far to try and catch up.
Hey!If somebody ( for example me ) want to have some sites, and some of them are related - and he don't want to do anything black hat or something like that, but one link would be nice to within this sites, will google devalue the link?
Additionally if in this in case should he use different c-class ips beside that he use same whois, google account on analytics and webmaster tools?
I'm searching the answer for 2 weeks...
Vu Tran is right. How about a Web Design company that also offers hosting for their clients and has a link on the website pointing to their homepage.
I happen to work with a company that has over 1000 client sites all hosted by them and all linking to their homepage. Can this be called a link farm? It wasn't created thinking of that...
Finally...a concisely articulated and authoritative video explaining the dangers of link farming. Sending to clients for sure.
How about a WBF discussing what to do if your client already bought into a link farm before you were hired?
Once again - another fantastic WBF. In watching, it raised a question for me: I manage about 18 old, trusted domains within the same family of brands. Currently, the only significant cross-linking occurs in the footer, although only to a limited degree, and the link anchors are generic terms and brand names. Would it be considered link farming to redesign/rewrite the footer, and in the process, to better link between these domains, using keyword-based link anchors?
Opinion:
I think it really depends on how extensive and manipulative it is.
The search engines aren't necessarily going to penalise a site for link farming. What they are trying to do is discount manufactured links as best as possible.
If the majority of your links are from link farming you might one day run into ranking problem.
If you have a good diverse backlink profile I don't think a bit of link farming will hurt. But, when it gets detected it certainly won't be helping.
And I think sitewide footer links are already discounted when pointing to other domains.
So - there's probably no cost/benefit, in terms of improved search rank, to be had from redesigning/rewriting 18 different footers?
I've seen footers work very well, when there is a decent amount of supporting text surrounding whatever links are in the footer. But simply putting links in the footer of every page is pointless, regardless of the anchor text, other than to help out the visitor.
I have to agree with sitewide footer links even intenal sitewides can have issues. Last week I discovered a page on a highy trusted site getting penalised because the link to it was from the footer only.
Can I ask how you determined they were penalized for that? I know of a guy that created a directory, added a link with a certain term for anchor text pointing to his site and become #1 for the term on Google with 10 pages and barely any content. 5,000 backlinks helped him quite a bit.
No penalty and his competitor has over 450 indexed pages, unique-content, and google dropped his site to #2.
I try to follow googles guidelines, but the more I watch the more I see that they really are not holding true.
I'm interested in how the SEs determine a section is a footer. I wonder if they parse the div id's and discount all those like "ft", "footer", etc., or if it's a general mechanism that happens to hit footers of discounting div's where the ration of text to links is low (like in blogrolls).
Could I put my footer content near the top, code-wise, and get the footer links ranked better?Or just change the id on the footer?
This is a great video that made me take a look at some of my recent activities and wonder how close to the line I have been getting with a few sites. They were not setup for link farming but could be seen in that light.
It's interesting how well known trusted sites can get away with things like this by linking their sites together from their footers. WebMD is a prime example. I guess their overall link profiles are good enough that they can rank without these links – I’m assuming these links don’t get penalized but just get discounted.
Nice video, but like Stefan Sizzle mentioned, that "tactic" can be used in wrong way by search engines. How about webhosting companies? ;]
Same whois data, same IP addresses...
So, I have two blogs: One about investing and one about taxation. They each earn links on their own.
I link between them pretty extensively--not really for search purposes, but simply because tax-related topics get brought up pretty regularly when discussing investing.
Do I need to worry? At the moment, they each get search traffic, and certainly don't appear to be penalized in any way.
I would say that in this case you don't have to worry because you are building 2 legitimate sites on their own, now the links (although you may own both blogs) through what you said are here to provide relevant additional information.
There's a fine line between what is legitimate and what is not.
The easiest way to look at it is to imagine yourself as working for Google and staring at your blogs and links.
Do you feel that Wow, great resources! or just humm... seems like this site is worthless and just here to feed the other one over there...
Well...I like to think they're great resources. :)
Thanks for the reply.
Another great post Rand.
One obvious question though, what do you do to fix this if you have taken on a client who has seen the error of their ways and wants to protect themselves against any future problems?
I have recently taken on a client that has spent ALOT of time in setting up their 'link farm'. In truth each site could stand up by it's self with it's unique content and do all rank very well for there keywords. But they do all link to each other and link to a single site.
Should I a) 301 redirect all the domains to the main one, b) remove all the 'in-linking' and get them to focus real link building for each site c) run for the hills :) d) other.....
Thanks for the vid. I have a question though..
The situation:
I have a network of websites that are about travelling. There's something like thirty different websites, each with their own unique content about the place of interest (country or cities).
Each website uses the same graphical lay-out, so I'm not hiding the fact that the websites are related. Seeing as how each and one of them is about travelling, they should be considered relevant?
On each website there's something like a 'blogroll', with links to all the other travelling sites.
Is this considered linkfarming or is it allowed?
In fact thinking about it the Break Media network (break.com, cagepotato.com, chikipedia.com) all link to each other, header and footer.
Aside from the fact that link farming does still (currently) work (unless it's too obvious), you'll have to amend the whiteboard to something more along the lines of content lite link farms will eventually get discounted.
Great information Rand. People still really do this? Linking is such a complex world!!!
I know for the keywords that I am trying to rank for the top one or two positions have a lot of this going on. When I check their backlinks I can't believe that they are still ranking with all the B.S. links they have.
But, I would rather still do it the 'right' way for longevity purposes.
I've also seen in a n umber of competitive spaces, the top three to four sites have some very fishy links and probably a certain degree of "link farm" sort of activities going on, but it's again, time I don't have to look into.
Once again, the tried and true whitehat, long-term approach wins :)
I've also seen in a number of competitive spaces, the top three to four sites have some very fishy links and probably a certain degree of "link farm" sort of activities going on, but it's again, time I don't have to look into.
Once again, the tried and true whitehat, long-term approach wins :)
My first thought was - "but look at IAC". However, I think the significant point of the video was 'the effort required'. I really do not see it as beneficial if doing it solely for links. If each site can stand on it's own as an entity, then sure, why not. They'll be viable websites in-and-of-themselves.
There goes my plan for world domination then ;)
I felt so bad for Rand, seeing him hobble along. Get well soon Rand! We need you!
great vid. i tend to learn things easier from what not to do so this really helped a lot.
but i agree with jeepfish's quote: "How about a WBF discussing what to do if your client already bought into a link farm before you were hired?"
I laughed that much seeing your video and singing along the song.
Thanks for that advise. It was just a matter of time when those tactics where detectable by Google
hi i am jon from media marketing online, a seo company india , have an query. The all mentioned by you here is link farming then what do you say to Directories website?
What is wrong with these people?
Here's a suggestion. How about a thumbs down threshold? Like on digg. If a comment's ratio of thumbs down is 4 times greater than its thumbs up, then auto-collapse it. This way we can effectively remove worthless spam comments like these from the conversation.
Good idea, Darren, I'll submit it as a feature suggestion.
or just remove the links
How did this guy get a link on there? I can not link and it shows him as having negative points.
Auto Finance
[link spam removed]
Very nice.
*Sigh*
When will they learn that comments are nofollowed?
I personally like thier profile, they have an impressive "About" section. =)
If only they took some time to "optimize" for agency recruitment.
Dang, Chenry!
You made me look. ;)
Ha, well it's worth see and understanding that it doesn't work. Even though most of us know it's a below rookie move.