Cheating on link farms

People that join link farms but never link back

[fkottar]

Hi
A few months ago, out of nowhere came two brand new websites by the same webmaster but for different clients. They quickly climbed to first and second position, even if they are not doing link exchange. They do not seem to be cheating on the page itself but when I checked their backlinks I found some pages with link farms linking to them.
The issue is this: their pages do not contain links to any other link-farmed pages.
It seems as if they have joined these programs but never (or very briefly) linked back. Apparently the webmasters of the other domains are not paying very close attention to this fact, but they are in fact PR5 pages.

Is there anything I can do? Other than ethics and pride, is there anything stoping anyone in this forum from joining a link farm and not linking back?

[vincevincevince]

Other than ethics and pride, is there anything stoping anyone in this forum from joining a link farm and not linking back?

Apart from the threat of removal from the farm if found, nothing. I'd say it's a perfectly legitimate SEO proceedure.

_{So far as ethics and pride go... not only would I call reducing link farm participation ethical, I'd be at least a little smug about it.}

If it bugs you I suspect that notifying the domains who haven't noticed would lead to the removal of links.

[Dolemite]

What happened to "honor among theives", eh? ;)

[digitalghost]

Hello fkottar, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Not sure how your question relates to Google but here goes.

1. I suppose you could write the linkfarms and tell them you found some people cheating.

2. Stop worrying about people and linkfarms, develop great copy and acquire your own links.

3. When all else fails there's [google.com...]

[korkus2000]

Whats the problem? Where does your site come in? Do you own the link farms?

[mfishy]

Is this posted "tongue in cheek"?

If not, maybe you are unaware of the irony that Linkfarms are themselves "cheating" google...

[fkottar]

Well the story about my website is kinda particular. First, it's not even mine. My boss had it running before I started working for him (partly webmastering/partly assistant work). He didn't want me to redevelop the website from scratch so my creative freedom is pretty limited. Moreover, he likes to edit the website himself (in FrontPage lol), so formats are not respected and optimization is pretty much limited to link exchange and a few more things.

I did manage however to get it first/second for most our keywords, but it has been dropping in the last few months because everyone in my business is cheating and they:
a)take a long time to get banned
b)don't stay banned long enough, even if they never remove the hidden text.
Apparently they already realized they get back on Google automatically no matter whether or not they remove their linkfarming/hidden links & text/gateway pages.

These two pages I referred to in the first post are something else. They are very nice but they have no content, few backlinks and they somehow rank very well. I was hoping maybe it could be the link farming thing they are doing.

I have been developing a completely new website (in Dreamweaver). The templates are done; my boss will write the content in Word and I will add it to the pages myself. I used SSI's and followed every optimization rule I could think about. Hopefully this one will do better and will be easier to adapt to changes in the algo.

edit: typos

[Brett_Tabke]

So send in a report to Google (who will probably do nothing about it since it probably isn't a real problem to them). end of story.