Link farms:Link farms are simply pages of links that are only created to artificially boost a
linking strategy in an effort to speed the appearance of the web site in the top search rank-
ing positions.
Spamblogs:These are machine-generated blogs and their only purpose is to draw search
engine rankings.
Page hijacking:Page hijacking is accomplished by copying a very popular page on the
Web and using it to represent your site to search engines. When users see your page in
search results, they click through the link only to be taken to your actual page.Use Caution with Link-Trading Strategies
I
f content is one of the most important elements of a web site, links are probably the next. Most
search engines now look at links to a web site — both those that lead to the site and those that lead
away from the site.In an effort to take advantage of the authority that links give a web site, many web-site owners have
banded together to take create link-trading or reciprocal linking strategies. These are “You link to me
and I’ll link to you” strategies.For a long time, those strategies worked pretty well. You could send out an e-mail to a company and
suggest that the two sites create links, each to the other’s site. By doing that both sites gained a link
into their site and a link out of their site.Then some people began taking advantage of the strategy and rather than exchanging links with
other, relevant web sites, they began to exchange links with anyone who would allow it. Then those
same unethical people began building dozens, hundreds, and in some cases even thousands of web
sites with the specific intent of cross-linking with the one page for which they were trying to artifi-
cially raise the ranking.And that’s when search engines began to take note. They noticed that people were manipulating link
trading schemes to boost their search ranking, and some added to their guidelines that reciprocal
linking and link-trading strategies were unacceptable. The result? If you use these strategies, you
could be banned from the search results.So does that mean that you can never link to a page that’s going to link back to you? No. What it
means is that search engines are now paying more attention to the placesthat you link to. They’re
looking at the sites to which you’re linking to make sure they’re relevant and have something of
value to offer to users who might click through the links.If your links do meet those requirements, you won’t be penalized for them. If they appear to be links
just for the sake of linking, though, your site will be penalized and in some cases even delisted from
a search engine. So if you plan to exchange links with other web sites, make sure those sites are rel-
evant to the topic of your web site or the web page on which the link appears.242
Part III Optimizing Search Strategies
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