When it comes to SEO, businesses utilize various techniques to help reach the top of SERPs. When done right, SEO can be incredibly useful in helping your business garner more organic traffic than ever before. However, SEO isn’t just about the quantity of traffic, but the quality too. The ‘right’ SEO techniques can help you generate leads with a much greater chance of converting.
One of the most effective SEO techniques is link building. It allows you to show users that your website is reliable and trustworthy, with links from high DA websites cementing your online authority. However, there are plenty of back-alley SEO practices in use too, and using link farms is amongst the most popular.
Link building is by no means easy, and link farms can seem like a quick and cost-effective hack to winning high rankings. However, link farms can damage your brand’s reputation irreparably. How, you ask? Before we jump into what link farms are and why you should avoid them, you need to understand the role keywords play in the entire process.
Importance Of Keywords For Successful Link Building
Keywords are the backbone of successful SEOand influence every other aspect of your strategy. Having the right keywords is essential if you want to develop relevant, engaging, high-quality content to build backlinks. The best way of finding the most relevant keywords for your business is through extensive keyword research.
However, with useful tools on the market, there’s no need for you to spend hours analyzing each keyword to figure out whether it’s worth competing for or not. Instead, a keyword checker can let you analyze up to 100 keywords in one go and assess their traffic potential and competitive density. Keyword checkers can also help you generate a list of related topicsessential to creating content relevant to your niche. Once you have your keywords, you can generate relevant links.
What Are Link Farms?
In straightforward terms, a link farm is a website, or sometimes a collection of websitesthat increase the link popularity of another website by merely increasing the number of inbound links to it. Link farms look like any regular page, but most of the content is subpar and irrelevant, and often useless to the average internet user. Don’t get us wrong. Inbound links are useful, but only when they’re high-quality. Companies and business owners generally spend a lot of money to purchase links from a link farm in bulk for a quick jump in their search engine rankings.
To understand why link farms are bad, you need to know the basics of link building. Once you have the right keywords, you can generate relevant, high-DA links. Link building is one of the most effective ways to gain high-quality organic traffic and boost your ranking. However, there are multiple factors to consider if you want your link building strategy to be effective.
Only links from high-DA websites with relevant content will make link building beneficial. Links from low-DA websites with irrelevant content,such as a link farm, can significantly lower your website’s reliability. When you work with link farms, you might get many links, but they’ll be from low-DA websites. Content on link farms is often created by bots, making it low quality and unengaging. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
Link Farms Can Get You Hefty Penalties
One of the biggest reasons you need to avoid link farms like the plague is because they can get your website slapped with hefty penalties. These penalties won’t just drive your ranking to drop, but your website might vanish altogether from search engine pages. While this wasn’t always the case, recent updates to Google’s search engine algorithm crush any attempts to manipulate SERP results via low quality tactics such as link farming.
This update ensures that websites with relevant, high-authority backlinks get their just rewards, while those with shady links get penalized. The penalties can be either manual or algorithmic. With manual penalties, you may get a warning before your website is penalized. However, with algorithmic penalties, you’ll wake up one fine morning only to find out that your website has been de-indexed. If that isn’t a motivator to steer clear of link farms, we don’t know what is!
Link Farms Can Lower Your Reputation
The EAT principle is essential to your website’s success. When ranking your website, search engines take into account the Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness of your website and the content you put on it. These factors are even more criticalinnichesthat can impact users’ lives or cost them money. Low-quality links acquired from a link farm can significantly lower yourwebsite’s reputation with your clients and search engines alike.
If clients find shady backlinks on your website, they’re much likelier to distrust your services. Inbound links from adult websites, gambling sites, or forums with abusive language can cause you to lose much credibility. And trust us when we say this; most of the links from link farms are from such websites. Black-hat SEO techniques win you no brownie points with search engines and clients alike, so you should steer clear of them.
Alternatively, consider these options:
Guest Posting Instead Of Link Farming
Many resort to link farmingbecauseit’s challenging to build a profile of high-authority inbound links. And we’ve just told you why you shouldn’t. On the contrary, guest posting is an effective way of building backlinks. It can help you reach a new, targeted audience on a good platform. Furthermore, you can establish your place as an expert in your field. High-quality guest posts can go a long way in building trust in your brand.
Moreover, well-written guest post content is evergreen and can bring you benefits in the long run. All of this in contrast to the low-quality content on low DA websites that you would get via link farming. Need we say more?
Create High-Quality Content To Win Backlinks
Another effective way to win high-DA backlinks is by focusing on your products, services, and content. With high-quality services and content, you can win natural backlinks in reviews and comments on various forums. Reviews are incredibly useful in boosting your ranking and your reputation. Search engines are increasingly focused on user experience when ranking websites, and good reviews from customers can go a long way in cementing your place as a reliable service provider. Additionally, with many good reviews under your belt, you can make more sales. Only 13% of consumers state that they would invest in a business with 1 or 2-star ratings. So, stay away from link farms and focus your resources on providing high-quality services and getting stellar reviews.
Conclusion
Perfecting your SEO strategy is no easy task, and it can take time and resources. Building a solid backlink profile is easily one of the most challenging SEO tasks to execute correctly, but when done right, it wins you immense benefits both in the short and long run. On the other hand, link farms are a shortcut that can cause irreparable damage to your website, business, and your identity. Keep well away from them. And we mean AWAY!Instead, focus on getting the best keywords, creating high-quality, relevant content, and you can boost your website’s ranking and reputation in no time!
