Top Tip Tuesday – Avoid Link Farms & Fake Websites

Link building is essential for SEO. Links act like votes of confidence – when someone links to your site from their site, that shows Google that your website is trustworthy and useful. Thus, having several links pointing to your website from high-quality, authoritative domains is one of the best ways to increase your rankings in the organic search space.

But there are good ways to do link-building and bad ways to do link-building. In particular, link farms and fake websites should be avoided when building links or else you could end up with a Google penalty. Jay explains more in today’s Top Tip Tuesday video.

What are Link Farms?

Links farms are a set of inter-related websites that at one time were widely used by SEOs to increase page rankings. However, Google has become quite sophisticated at detecting link farms and penalising sites that rely on them by greatly reducing their rankings on the search engine results pages. Why does Google care if you put links on link farms? Because as mentioned above, links are supposed to be votes of confidence from other people. If you obtain your links through link farms, you are cheating the system – and Google punishes cheaters. That is why buying links from a link farm can be detrimental in the long run, even if it gives you a temporary boost at first.

What are Fake Websites?

“Fake websites” are websites that are created with the express purpose of including backlinks that point to another domain. These websites are easily flagged by Google as spammy because they usually contain very thin (or duplicate) content and a lot of links pointing to the same place. It may seem like a good idea to create a fake website with links pointing to your real website, but this is an SEO strategy that can easily backfire once Google picks up on it.

So what makes for good link-building?

The best link-building is natural link-building. By natural link-building, we mean obtaining links on relevant directories in your industry, releasing newsworthy content on press release sites (with relevant links back to your site), producing blog content that gets shared by your website visitors and being linked to by related sites and partners in your industry. Those are the link-building strategies that Google rewards, and the strategies that we follow for our clients here at Pure SEO.

Learn more about our search engine optimisation services.