Link Farming? Company asking resellers to link back to them

[kieranmullen]

Or is asking all of their resellers of their product to make a link back to their homepage in white text.

This is link farming correct? Will it really help them?

As far as I know google knows of these tricks already and they really are not new so I do not believe it will help.

What is the general consensus here?

Thank you

[agerhart]

No bueno....shady practice at best. Tell them hidden text and unnatural links are against the search engine's TOS.

And then tell them that even if it wasn't against the TOS the link wouldn't be free :)

[kieranmullen]

My bad. It is visible text. What do you mean by unnatural links? Both my business and theirs are related business tpyes.

[agerhart]

If you feel that a link back to their site would be helpful for your site, your business, and your users than by all means go ahead and add the link.

[g1smd]

You could always add "nofollow" to the link, or even assemble the link HTML by writing it from an external JavaScript file.

If you are going to show the link in white text, put it on a black background.

[JS_Harris]

Compromise, write a wikipedia like quality article about that company and link to them from the article, place a link on your index page to the article.

Adding links in places that don't make sense for readers usually doesn't yield good results.

[nealrodriguez]

Will it really help them?

if it is a link without a 'nofollow' tag, it will pass link equity, which is one of the ranking factors google gauges when determining which pages should be posted on it's front page when queried for relevant keywords. further they will receive traffic from visitors clicking on the link from your site

This is link farming correct?

if you are unsure of the other site's motives, be aware of link practices google warns against:

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

[google.com...]

[kieranmullen]

It is a related company and it is not spamming. I was just wondeirng if it will help my pagerank as well. Thank you

[martinibuster]

1. Not link farming.
2. Won't help your pagerank
3. Good or bad, this will associate your site with everyone else who is linking to that company.
4. This will associate your site with that company and their linking practices.
5. A natural vote is a voluntary link. A vote that is compulsory is not natural and therefore spammy. If you care about such things, it's also probably in violation of Google's webmaster policies.

[piatkow]

Do you have a good natural reason to link back?
Does it add value for your customers - for example does it give them access to tech support documentation?

If the answer to those questions is yes then do it.

[nealrodriguez]

I was just wondeirng if it will help my pagerank as well. Thank you

the following thread delved into how to leverage outbound links:

Do Outbound Links help my PR ?
[webmasterworld.com...]