What is a Link Farm?
A link farm is a term used to describe a group of websites that all share links with each other to help manipulate their rankings in the SERPs. Link farms are commonly mistaken for PBNs (private blog networks) but have a couple of key differences, PBNs share their link juice externally to other websites rather than with a group of internal sites, and they are also commonly used to sell link placements or guest post placements to Link building websites for SEO purposes.
Are link farms useful for SEO?
Link farms are considered a black-hat SEO tactic and violate Google’s spam policies. Using these practices to build links to your website not only puts you at risk of being penalised in the SERPs but also by getting manual actions taken against your website, which sometimes you can never recover from.
It’s important for webmasters to learn how to build links naturally and avoid link farms, as when Google does catch a link farm, it penalises the site and all the sites that it links to.
How can we detect link farms?
If you’re ever in a position where you can get a link from a website, it’s important to analyse the site you are getting the link from to make sure it’s not from a link farm, there are a few ways to do this, you will need access to an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to analyse the site, there are some free tools and trials you can use to check the things you need too:
Evaluate the quality of a website
The first and probably the most important point, look at the website yourself, you don’t need access to any SEO tools to do this. Ask yourself, does the website content make sense? and, does the website cover a specific topic or does it talk about everything?
Link farms generally have poorly written content or AI-generated content that really doesn’t cover topics in real depth or provide any real value. That’s because its sole purpose is to manipulate rankings. For example, if the website you’re looking at has articles on plumbing and also articles on medical topics or health and beauty, this would be a red flag, as these topics generally don’t go together.
Link farm websites can also be flagged from a design perspective, they generally use a template design that doesn’t look good, and they use cheap URLs for their top-level domains (TLD) such as .xyz or .top etc.
Look for information about the author of the content
Link farms generally won’t publish any content with authorship, or they will use fake author profiles using stock or AI-generated images. You can usually tell as they either do not have an “About us” page, or if they do, it’s very vague and doesn’t tell you who runs or owns the site you’re looking at. They’ll also not have any contact information on the site, or contact forms that don’t really work.
Check the number of external links the site has
When you’re writing content, it’s good practice to link out to relevant sites that have the highest authority on the subject matter, as this offers context and helps back up your claims or support your argument. Sites that are good for this are sites like Google or Wikipedia, as they hold a very high website domain authority or DR and you can be almost certain that the information you’re linking too is correct.
If you are looking at a website to link to that has a huge number of external links (this can be checked with your SEO tools), then take caution. Have a look at the site’s overall authority and external linking, is the external linking natural? does it use natural anchor text for the links (not money terms)? You can also read a page that has some external links on it, does the external link and placement make sense? Is it serving a purpose? if not, it may be a link farm.
Don’t be fooled!
Even if you find a website that is well-design, has a good authority or domain score and has good content, it doesn’t mean that it’s not part of a link farm. The best thing you can do is follow Google’s guidelines and reach out to have a conversation with the site owner, build a relationship with them and see where you can offer value to them and vice versa.
You can also look at the history of the website for more in-depth information. How long has the site been live for? has the increase in site organic traffic over the years been natural? do they rank for key terms that make no sense? All of these questions will help you understand if the website is worth linking too.
