Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I strongly object to "Link farming" where sites flood the net with links to their site from completely irrelevant sites, there by artificially inflating there page rank.
One of my Clients competition uses this technique, and is Very successful. How do I convince my client to stay with my ethical practices, when he is always ranked lower than the guy "cheating" (IMHO)
Where does Google stand on this? I looked at their abuse reporting page but they had no option for "Link farming"
Thanks.
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.Google Quality Guidelines [google.com]
I reported the site awhile ago, using the "Other" check box but nothing was done.
I have reported sites befor that where using redirects or hidden text and Google corected the problem right away. So it seems to me that they must be taking this linkfarming issue less seriously.
Much the same applies to G as far as I can see.....
"One of my Clients competition uses this technique, and is Very successful. How do I convince my client to stay with my ethical practices, when he is always ranked lower than the guy "cheating" (IMHO)"
I would tell the client that linkfarming is a risky business, and sooner or later that "successful" competitor will be caught and loose PR and mightbe deindexed.
Maybe you can redirect your client to read what Matt wrote, so he might understand how serious that matter is:
“Tell me about your backlinks”
[mattcutts.com...]
If a site sells ad space on a high traffic site, does Google consider that link farming also? I mean, not all sites are well SEO'd enough to make it rank high enough in Google to get significant traffic, so they need to buy space on a site that has traffic in their niche specific market to get traffic.
Why would this be bad? I do understand about the sites that are just doing this for increasing link popularity and just have hundreds of links, but has Google been penalizing for selling legitimate ad space...like classifieds?
It's a bit unclear really what they know and don't as they won't tell us exactly. They say they can find ads but really, how accurate is really. I'd say they know when you are doing run of site ads but not much else.
Just don't go selling 6,000 text link ads to any site whatsoever just for some quick cash, unless they'll pay you millions :)
Look for quality advertisers, preferably related to your site and sell a few ads on every page. Don't overdo it, your visitors won't like it too much.
If your business model is classifieds go for it too. I don't see eBay being any different to classifieds and their site doesn't suffer. That said, they are the 800 lbs gorilla.
Good luck
IMO, you will be ok, if you add rel=nofollow to the ad links you are selling. By that way you show that your aim is to sell traffic (which I don't think Google mind at all) and not for affecting PageRank values.
On the other hand, if you sell links or ads without being very careful about the destination, you can definitely hurt the "Google reputation" of your site, which may seem to hurt other sites you link to by no longer helping them. This may be the source of possible problems with reciprocal links to link farms. I think reciprocal links are fine, as long as you are very careful about not linking to site that doesn't place well in the SERPs.
As an extreme case I had an existing website which had been indexed in Google for a long time. I bought a domain name which had been expired and published a new site. To get the new site indexed, I put a link on the old site. The old site almost immediately went to supplemental results. My theory is that by linking to a "bad" url, I hurt the old site. I immediately registered a new, clean domain, moved the content of the "bad" url site to it, changed the link on the old site, and did a 301 redirect from the "bad" url to the new url. The old site returned to the main index.
I am not clear on whether the "rel=nofollow" trick is effective prevention for the harmful effects of linking to a bad destination. I think it might be, but I also think that since it is a practice which is being used to manipulate pagerank, it might be seen as a problem in the future.
I am not clear on whether the "rel=nofollow" trick is effective
prevention for the harmful effects of linking to a bad destination.
It is -- the reason the 3 major search engines agreed on this new attribute was to help blogs combat comment spam.
It seems to me that current SERPs in our niche are giving folks who bought 1000s of links an undeserved boost. The problem with PageRank is the fact that votes can be bought. The Web is like a third World state paying lip service to democracy. Intimidation and vote rigging are the tools used by the anti-democratic. The utopian view of the founders of Google where the assumption that one link equals one vote completely forgets that votes can be bought and on the Web pages and votes come relatively cheap. Its time for a re-think.
Sid
Matts response was "in my experience those links aren’t making much/any difference with Google"
Matts case is that Google is not passing on PR for these types of reciprocal links so no benefit is given.
But the fact remained that the site I pointed out to Matt was getting #1 placement for a lot of searches, and the site has poor content and is not often updated. So why is it doing so well?
I have looked deeper and looking at all the sites that link in to them have the links using the main keywords they are optimizing on followed by a short description.
Like this
Main Keywords here <- This is the link
Description Description description description....
Now the keywords in the link are relevant to the sites content. as is the description, but they have these links on thousands of totally irelivant sites. (IE a finance site in Bali linking to a adventure travel site)
So maybe Matt is right and they are not getting PR from theses links, but they are getting "Word rank" in that if you search for "Main Keywords here" as they used in the link text the site comes up #1.
In the end, they are participating in a linking scheme designed to improve their ranking and that seams to be clearly against Google’s guide line.
But Google doesn't seem to take this seriously.
How can I compete fairly against this?!
