A link farm is a group of websites that mainly exist to link to each other or to chosen target pages and so lift their rankings artificially. The pages usually have little value of their own.
How does Google classify link farms?
Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings. Examples include buying or selling links, excessive link exchanges, and using automated programs to create links. A link farm fits this description as a network of such links. The phrase itself does not appear in the policy text.
Links qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" are acceptable for advertising and sponsorship.
Typical signs
SEO articles describe link farms as pages with a large number of outbound links, often to unrelated sites, with thin or keyword-stuffed text and unnatural anchor text. This is an assessment from secondary sources and not a Google definition.
According to Wikipedia, link farms appeared around 1999, when search engines relied heavily on link popularity. Private blog networks (PBNs) are a later variant.
Example
Fifty domains with a few short texts each link to one client page, using the target keyword as anchor text. The domains have no visitors of their own and exist only for these links.
Sources
- Spam policies: link spam – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Link farm – Wikipedia (secondary source)en.wikipedia.org
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