Before the search engines wised up, site rankings were based on simple keyword match ups. Webmasters would simply load up their pages with keywords, irregardless of the sites’ actual content, and gain an unfair amount of attention.
As a result, Google started focusing instead on site popularity. Page rank was determined largely by how many other sites linked to a particular site, the theory being that if a lot of other sites pointed to a site, it must contain valuable content.
But the cat and mouse game between website promoters and search engines continued. So-called “link farms” and “free-for-all” (FFA) sites started to spring up. These were little more than huge collections of often useless links that were neither described nor categorized. They were simply dumped there in an effort by webmasters to make their sites seem more popular.
This gambit worked for awhile, but eventually the search engines caught on. Such “link farms” and FFA sites provided no real value to search engine users, and since those are the people that Google is focused on pleasing, it did not take kindly to this development. Such sites were simply cluttering up the Web and making it more difficult for searchers to find the real, quality online resources.
Google soon started to take into account not only the number of sites linking to a particular site, but their popularity as well. Soon thereafter, the “link farms” and FFA sites were categorized as spam and massively downgraded as a factor in determining a site’s popularity.
Google takes such a strong stand against such pages that today a site’s reputation can actually be harmed if it is linked to from link farm or FFA sites. At best, such links will water down your reputation and decrease the value of the positive links working in your favor. At worst, your site will be banned from the search engines for using such spammy methods to gain traffic.
Although you may be tempted to submit to link farms or FFA sites, you will not get quality, relevant links from such a submission. Besides, you probably don’t want to see your site listed among such junk sites as adult entertainment, make money fast and casinos. In short, such submissions entail agoodly amount of risk and won’t do much to enhance your credibility.
A better use of your time is to exchange links with relevant and credible sites and submit to the legitimate directories. Although this can be time consuming, it is a much better way to generate safe and targeted traffic.
Categories: 
Tags: 
