Ask what a link farm is on any forum or messageboard, and you’ll draw hundreds of comments doubting that you have the necessary intelligence to stay alive, if you don’t know such a basic fact! Actually, it isn’t always clear what sites would be considered link farms and which would not (and therefore which ones would kill your SEO rankings!), so we review the definition.

SEO

The link farm can be identified by its occupants!

The basics

Wikipedia defines a link farm as “any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group”.

How do you know if a site is a link farm?

One of the major clues is that they will ask for a link on your own site to theirs, in order to consider linking out to your site.

Another major clue will be their Pagerank. If the site has zero Pagerank (install the Google toolbar and you’ll see a site’s Pagerank in your browser), it is likely that Google considers them a link farm.

If the site has little content in relation to the number of links on its pages, that’s another big clue towards a diagnosis: link farm. If you can’t read 100 words without encountering ten or more links, Google probably considers it a link farm.

The links will be almost exclusively external (to other domains) if a site is a link farm.

And if you value your SEO dollar … stay away from them!