Link farm
A link farm is a collection of web pages on the web that primarily serves the purpose of placing as many hyperlinks as possible on another web presence .
purpose
The creation of such link farms is used for search engine optimization or the manipulation of search engines , i. This means that the linked website should be placed at the top of the hit list for search queries. The individual pages of such a link farm are often very similar or identical to one another.
This takes advantage of the fact that search engines rate websites not only on the basis of the text occurring on the page, but also on the basis of referring links and their anchor text. More referring links usually mean a better placement in the search results.
prevention
However, search engines take into account not only the number of links pointing to a page links, but also their quality ( link popularity in Google by the PageRank calculated). The Google bomb uses a similar technique . However, a page should not be upgraded, but placed in a special reference. Most search engine guidelines warn against creating link farms. Violations can be punished with the exclusion of individual pages or entire domains from the search index. Google, for example, now reliably recognizes link farms and devalues these links.
Another way - which is compliant with the guidelines - to improve the rank of a website is link building . Webmasters from other relevant sites are contacted in order to receive a link to their own site from them.
Further meaning
Link farms are also called file systems or directories that consist of many links (under Unix : symbolic links ) to the actual data, possibly on several levels. This is done to achieve more flexibility or if data that is available in a fixed file system is to be presented under different names.