Link Farming

Link farming is a questionable search engine optimization (SEO) tactic in which a website enters a relationship of reciprocal linking with another site or pays a provider for a large number of inbound links. Because many search engines use inbound links as a factor in determining a website's page rank, websites use link farming to boost their rankings in search engine results.

A link farm is a website (or a group of websites) created only for the purpose of increasing the link popularity of another site by increasing the number of incoming links. A link farm usually looks like a regular web page, but the majority of the content is hyperlinks -- often random and unrelated -- to other websites. 

Link farms can be advertised as services to build up your content. They are often set up by creating a network -- one that is often created with the sole purpose of gathering a number of locations from which to point at a website. Because Google dislikes links between unrelated sites, some link farms divide their links into categories or a directory.

Link farms were originated in response to Google's ranking algorithm, PageRank. PageRank thinks of links as votes, where a page linking to another page is casting a vote. Therefore, pages with the most links were deemed valuable. Link farms were created to help increase PageRank, however, in recent times, Google and other search engines have adapted their algorithms to prevent link farms from appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Web sites that have created link farms can be penalized by Google and other search engines.

Link farming is considered a "black hat" method of search engine optimization (SEO) because the content on the web sites linking to each other is often not related, not created by a human (it can be created using programs or services) and is often of a very low quality. Search engines can detect link farms easily and they shouldn't be seen as a legitimate long-term search optimization strategy.

Now, link farming often fails because search engines have evolved to rank results based on what will be most useful for the user. This means that a link from a site with trusted content or similar content to the page to which it is linking is worth more than random links from many sites.

In essence, search engines attempt to encourage websites to gain authority – and thus page rank – in the most legitimate way possible. The ideal way to gain page rank is to create websites with great content that will be frequently linked to by other high-quality sites.

What is SERPs?

A search engine results page, or SERP, is the web page that appears in a browser window when a keyword query is put into a search field on a search engine page. The list of results generally includes a list of links to pages that are ranked from the most popular to the least popular from the number of hits for the particular keyword. The list will include not only the links, but also a short description of each page and of course, the titles of the web page. The term “search engine results page” may refer to a single page of links returned by a query or the entire set of links returned.

SERPs of major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Bing, may include different types of listings: 

• Contextual
• Algorithmic
• Organic search listings
• Sponsored listings
• Images
• Maps
• Definitions
• Videos
• Suggested search refinements

The major search engines visually differentiate specific content types, such as images, news, and blogs. Many content types have specialized SERP templates and visual enhancements on the main search result page.

The major search engines typically display three kinds of listings on their SERPs.

• Listings that have been indexed by the search engine's spider.
• Listings that have been indexed into the search engine's directory by a human.
• Listings that are paid to be listed by the search engine.

What Are SEO Stop Words?

Google and other big search engines have words or phrases that are considered 'stop words'. When a spider or crawler encounters one of these stop words,they will immediately leave your website and any information they gathered from it will not be saved in their database. In order to speed up their searches and to save disk space, search engines like Google don’t record and never give much importance to stop words. It means that your website will not be indexed. 

In case, if your website is already indexed in a search engine, the crawler will come back to see if there are any updates - and if it finds stop words when it does this, then your site could get banned from the search engine. You will not be allowed to remove the words and re-submit: it's too late.

Definition

Stop words are very common words or adjectives that can hinder your SEO efforts. Words such as, 'of ', 'or', 'the' etc. interfere with your SEO efforts because they use up precious character space, especially when creating web page titles.

An article or content without these stop words goes meaning less and reduces readability, so it’s not to avoid these words in content, but better is to avoid it in your URLs and Titles. A page title should be not more than 70 characters and when you use this stop words in titles it will fill up the character space. Your page title should be concise as well as the use of stop words will reduces the keyword density which have a tiny impact on your search rankings.

A clear focus keyword without these stop words will reach out your audience. Also search engines will know that you have some strong relevant content and gives importance to your site.

Here is an example of how a page title can be adjusted to eliminate stop words and increase keyword density.

Original title:

Official Home Page of the Office of (office name here) at the Illinois Institute of Technology

Change to

(Office name here)  | Illinois Institute Technology

Use of Stop words in URLs: Take this URL as an example www.yoursite.com/category/this-is-how-not-how-to-have-a-url-structure/

This URL has maximum use of stop words and makes it big in length.

Without Stop words in URLs:

So avoid stop words in URLs and make it like this www.yoursite.com/category/good-url-structure/ which is SEO friendly.

List of common stop words

A, is, what, who, how, was, this, that, but, at, be, for, he, she, am, I, in, its, your, with, all, any, did, do, had, has, here, his, and, etc.

Summary:

1- Use your most important keywords at the beginning of the title, meta tags, link texts and body text.

2- Avoid using filter words to increase the effectiveness of your keywords.

3- Make sure that your web pages have the right keyword density and don't contain stop words.

The right keyword mix on your web pages will help you to improve your ranking on all important search engines.