SoURCES:

http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/promo_no7.htm

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Link-Farming-No-Good-Harvest/

So, you decided to be a SEO freelancer and you know what you need to do. You need to bring links to your sites, and you need to bring a lot of them. Because crawlers for search engines use link popularity as one of their most fundamental factors for determining site popularity.

And, what’s this? There are sites dedicated to building links that can connect you to hundreds, even thousands, of them just by connecting to one site, appropriately dubbed a ‘link farm.’

Well, then your job just got a whole lot easier. Link up and watch the numbers rise.

Not exactly.

Link farms are detrimental to your SEO projects. Why, you ask? Because the minute you hook up to a link farm you are joining their team. And their team is appropriately dubbed ‘spam’ by search engines, and spam does not get the crawlers attention. Well, actually it does, in a truly horrible way as the minute crawlers recognize you as spam they knock you off their searchable index.

According to alltheweb.com, the general web policy for crawlers and link farms is as follows:

Disregard Link Stuffing (farming) when building the index and computing static rank, and to reduce the static rank of the documents containing it.

Meaning, you farm, you harm.

But that is not to say that link building is not the best way to increase SEO, because it is. Rather, as an SEO expert, you can do wonders for your site by building a solid foundation of links that are pertinent to your own goals. Meaning, if you are interested in SEO, then taking the time to read and share links that involve solid SEO advice and tips can do wonder for your site. Often, most quality sites you link to will reciprocate and help you build a solid SEO foundation that crawlers will latch onto. Because the goal of SEO is really about link building, but the quality of links are just as important as the quantity.

So take the time to read what you link, make sure it is something you would want to attach your good name to before you link to it. Because, in the end, the connections you make will be the ones that make you.