The Dangers of Reciprocal Link Services (Link Farms) By: Billy Fullerton When it comes to link farms the only thing that I can say is don't do it.
Link farms or reciprocal link services as they prefer to be known as, are the most damaging "link popularity solutions" I have come across. You have probably come across these "promotion" sites and you may have even considered them or in-fact joined one.
Basically what happens here is you will sign up and become a member, some of these also charge a fee!
You will then be asked to upload a links page to your web site (which will be incorporated into your global navigation) that will contain links to loads of sites that you've never heard of and most of which will not even be relevant to you or your website theme. Which of course will do you no good right away even before you've managed to get off the starting blocks.
It is also common for adult sites to be included in these pages, so as you can imagine it will do nothing for the standard of your site and your image.
The size of the links page that you will be asked to publish on your web site will depend entirely on the membership numbers. So you could end up with anything up to 500 links!
Every member has an identical links page, which is the reason everyone eventually gets caught out by the Main Search Engines. When they crawl the web and follow your links they will arrive at an identical links page on another site and so on. It's impossible to avoid detection forever and when you get caught out you run the risk of being penalized if not banned altogether.
Google has as far as I'm aware banned the odd site or two in the past for joining these services and there is nothing out there to make me believe that their attitude will change towards link farms. My advice to you is simple. If you are a member of such a service then cancel your membership and delete the links page today before you damage your site more than you care to think about.
There are so many other options that you can implement to improve the profile of your web site. Don't do this; it's not worth it!!!
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