Google encourages (unobtrusive) link farms

I use the word link farms, but I could have equally well used ‘partner sites’, ‘featured links’, or ‘popular searches’; all of which are used instead.

You may be wondering what on Earth I’m talking about. Link farms are so last century, the search engines don’t respect them any longer and will likely blacklist your site for using them (or gateway pages). However, link farms are all around and growing in usage. They’re back in a very sneaky form. You’ve probably seen these on sites, like these links that were along the bottom of an antique dealer’s site.

With Google’s Pagerank putting weight on the number of incoming links, every possible strategy is being used. A site without incoming links is pretty pointless now, particularly if you’re in a highly competitive market such as renting florida villas. So the owners promoting these sites take the opportunity to purchase links from other sites. Sites with irrelevant content. Whole sites built just to provide links to other sites to increase their search engine ranking.

Today it’s nowhere as obvious as the link-farms of yesteryear. Oh no, these guys have learned their lesson. Neither are most computer-generated junk; instead a few of the sponsored links are added to proper-looking pages.

Let’s suppose the search engines agreed this was not a good way to measure popularity (he who buys the most links is the most popular). They would have a problem. How can you tell the difference between a page of content with random links placed at the bottom of the page to purposefully increase search engine ranking and a blog with a selection of random links in the linkblog?

Here’s an example I found which for a computer would (should?) be hard to distinguish automatically:

I don’t want to play that game. To me it feels like match fixing, fiddling the accounts - it just shouldn’t be done. I believe it’s an ethical problem - it may work, but it isn’t measuring whether the content of the site is good, or whether the site provides a relevant match. There’s also the wrinkle that to do well in search engine results, why should I pay people to clutter up the internet with more useless search engine fodder?

As always, your thoughts are appreciated.

Here’s some more examples: