Link Schemes

SEO Black Hat Techniques: What NOT to do

What are Link Schemes?

Although it is now less common to come across web pages with long lists of links, some webmasters still engage in link schemes, such as link farms, link swaps, and link purchases. Google’s advice is not to participate in any link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking as this violates their guidelines and will negatively impact your site's ranking in search results.

Do link farms work?

Link farms are a group of pages that link to all of the other pages in the group. Unfortunately, the links gained are almost worthless these days because most search engines now have programmes to discard link farm pages from rankings and search results. As link farms have become more and more irrelevant and negative, most web builders now know to avoid them.

What is link swapping?

Link swapping (or cross-linking) is a common practice but not necessarily a good one. Links that are swapped purely in order to affect search results are easily detected and penalised by the search engines. However, links swapped with relevant sites (see below) are viewed positively if the sites in question will be useful to users.

What about purchase links?

Purchasing links is still popular with some webmasters who may see their rankings increase as a result. However, they’re not likely to get away with it for long as the search engines are taking measures to stop this practice. When a bought link is detected it’s flagged up and rendered worthless for ranking purposes. In the worst cases, the site will be banned.

A quote from Google

“Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can have a negative effect on your site's ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

Links intended to manipulate PageRank
Links to web spammers or bad neighbourhoods on the web
Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank”

Are all links seen as bad?

No! Link-building is widely recognised as good SEO practice provided that the links are relevant. A rule of thumb is that if it’s helpful/relevant to the reader then it’s most likely helpful to your ranking. It is definitely a case of quality not quantity: a few good quality, relevant links are worth far more than hundreds of irrelevant ones.

It is therefore worth taking time to grow your links slowly by being selective, as this will benefit the long-term development of your site. Best of all are links which flow in one direction so, if you can, try to get relevant sites to link to you without you having to link back; this will serve as positive endorsement of your site and its content.