Link Farm

What Is A Link Farm?

A link farm is a group of websites that link to each other to manipulate keyword rankings in the organic search results.

Link farm sites often have little to no quality content.

They exist solely to increase the number of backlinks pointing at them, inflating key link-building metrics like domain authority and domain rating.

Let me explain:

Websites within link farms come across as authoritative and trustworthy because of the number of links they have.

But there is a problem…

Because each site links to each other, you end up with a network of low-quality links. The sites look good from the outside, but when you dig a little bit deeper, you can clearly see that it’s spammy.

The truth is that Google can detect link farms easily and regards them as a completely black hat SEO tactic.

That means building a backlink from a link farm website will likely have no impact on your rankings.

In the worst cases, Google may even manually penalise you for it.

It’s just not worth the risk.

Link farms used to work well in the early days of SEO. It was all about the quantity of links over quality.

But these days, link farming tactics are all but dead.

How Do Link Farms Work?

Link farms work by creating a network of websites that link to each other to boost each site’s rankings.

Here’s a simple breakdown:

The link farm owner creates a group of different websites.

These sites might look different on the surface, but they are all owned and controlled by the same person.

Each website then places at least one link to each of the other sites in the network.

The idea is to make it look like these sites are authoritative and trustworthy because of the number of inbound links each has.

This creates a “farm” of websites that simply link to each other.

Whenever the owner makes a new website, they link from all the sites in the farm to the new site.

This immediately gives the new site the appearance of being authoritative and trustworthy. The goal is to boost the rankings quickly and even avoid the Google sandbox altogether.

Do link farms still work?

Short answer: No.

These days search engines like Google use a number of quality factors to review each website and link. That means they easily detect link farms and usually punish each website in the network with a Google penalty.

How To Identify Link Farms

Use this checklist to identify link farms:

Each of these points will help you clearly identify link farms.

For the most part you can identify a link farm by looking through the site and reading some of the content.

But sometimes you will have to dive deeper.

For this, my favourite tool is Ahrefs. It allows you to see the site’s estimated organic traffic and all key link factors to review it properly.

Tip: Don’t just rely on metrics like domain authority and domain rating to identify link farms.

It’s common for link farms to successfully manipulate these metrics and make them look better than they are.

Always do a manual review and combine the power of observation with SEO tools.