Just finished your new Google book and I’m dismayed to discover that my web site may be a link farm not a portal. The goal of this now updated site is to have students talk to other students via reviews of the handout links by doing “reviews”, like Amazon.com
My Google rank is currently 7, so I must be doing something right, but a link: report only shows 70 links to the site. Yet I know that there are many more. What gives? Is my site considered a link farm? and thereby not getting indexed by Google?
Thanks for your note and I’m glad that you’re finding value in Growing Your Business with Google. Now, on to your questions…
First off, let me reiterate that a link farm is commonly believed to be a site where its only purpose for existence is to have an ever-increasing database of links, typically without any underlying rhyme or reason. For example, if I had a link on this page that led you to my “best of the Web” area where anyone could submit and have added a link to any site, regardless of category, Google and other search engines tend to frown upon that.
The reason’s simple: if inbound links are considered a vote of confidence or an indication that a highly-linked site is somehow better than one with less links, the assumption is that each link is added by someone maintaining a site – or writing a blog entry – that found the content worthy of recommendation. underlying all the fancy algorithms and secret formula, that’s the core idea behind Google.
So you can see how having a site that exists purely to have two-directional links (because that’s the other half of a link farm: a requirement that every site you point to also points to you, making these huge, artificial webs) really does nothing to indicate what sites are better or worse than other sites.
Having said all that, a PageRank of 7 is quite good, so clearly the inbound links pointing to your site are good ones. In terms of the result of link: searches on Google, don’t believe those numbers. Many people believe that those results are more or less random because Google doesn’t want people to try and reverse engineer their PageRank formula, so while it reports 70, you might well have hundreds of links.
I’ve also heard reports of people with a PR6, for example, where a “link:” search only indicates a dozen or less inbound links!
If you have PageRank and can be found in the search engine at all, then you’re in reasonably good shape. You should check your log files to see how often GoogleBot is visiting your site, and a search for site:your base domain name will give you a rough sense of how many pages Google has in its index too. For example, site:askdavetaylor.com reports 583 pages (and link:www.askdavetaylor.com reports over 1100 inbound links, btw).
I hope this helps clear up some of your questions!
This is a good article to read!
It’s all about the relevancy of the site giving the link. If it has high page rank, but is completely off topic, the link weight will be diluted.
Thanks for the help..
Just wanna show my appreciation for the info you gave..
Anyways, was looking for effects of link farm..
So now I know I might not get indexed from Google..
Thanks!
Well can you please tell me whether Yahoo considers links from comments as valid inlinks and is it helpful in impro
Check out the new “links” section in google’s webmaster tools. You get a much more realistic idea of how many links googles sees for you. link:www.reliancemarine.com returns 16 links where as in the google webmaster tools, it shows my links as 127.
I had similar concerns about whether outbound links were damaging, but have come to the conclusion that when they are on dedicated resource pages, their impact is minimal. My home page has a current PR of 4 and a reasonable profile in search engines for keywords and has maintained this position for an extended period.
You mean linkdomain:(site) on Yahoo and link:(site) on MSN. You are backwards.
Carol Garcia
New interesting theme
If you want to check how many links you have try doing link checks on Yahoo and MSN
Yahoo: link:http://www.yourdomain.com
MSN: linkdomain:http://www.yourdomain.com
Much more accurate on showing inbound links.
Mike