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Bungee Bones Is Not A "Link Farm"

Here is a segment about link farms from Network Solutions with some of my own highlights:

"Since so many engines use link popularity as an integral part of their ranking algorithms, many webmasters responded by joining link farms and stuffing their sites and others with as many links as possible. But, all links are not good links. In fact, bad linking strategies may get you banned from some engines. A link farm is a network of web pages, which are heavily cross-linked with each other for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity. The web pages usually are in more than one domain or in more than one server. When a web site joins a link farm, it gets a link from each of these pages and in turn it also has to link back to each of those pages. This will then affect the link popularity of the site.

But search engines definitely detect the link farms as well as the web sites participating in the link farms. Google®, for one, disapproves of link farms and labels the links they generate as spam. In fact, some sites get removed from the index altogether if they are affiliated with link farms or link stuffing. Because of this, some webmasters have chosen to remove all links going out to other sites.

That is an overreaction that decreases the site value to visitors and hurts the Web in general because cross-linking is a basic tenet of the Internet. Links are fine - even encouraged - if they are related to your topic, but link farms rarely provide useful content to visitors. If your site is selling cars, linking to car parts sites, car forums and other car related sites, is very safe and encouraged. You are only providing access to other sites that are of interest to your visitors. But, if you signed up with a service that promises to generate five hundred inbound links to your site only if you agree to add two hundred outbound links in return, then you are likely participating in a link farm.

Instead of linking to related information of value to your visitors, you are sending them to sites with non-relevant and useless information. Search engines will not penalize you for good, relevant links, but are quick to punish sites that try to spam them with unrelated links."

For anyone that is concerned that the high quality directory that Bungee Bones creates could be construed as a link farm we point out that if you are in the bottom half of a search results or one of 114 million websites NOT on the first three results pages for your term is this really a legitimate fear? There is also some rather bizarre logic with this supposed ban. Incoming links are the ones that search engines place the most value on. If you filter your outgoing links by only displaying a portion of outgoing links (i.e. only displaying certain categories) the ratio of incoming links to outgoing links would be greatly increased. That is the exact same thing that the search engines rank high. Having an equal number of outgoing links seems to me to dilute the effect of a link farm. Limiting outgoing links as the article suggests seems to be doing the very thing the search engines are fighting.

What if you place a "no index, no follow" robot tag so that search engines don't index the out going links? Would the search engines benefit by that? Since the SE robots live for following links one would think they would be the loser in removing outgoing links. The article's supposed search engine policy doesn't say much for the search engine's faith in their own algorithms does it? Perhaps that is why they return hundreds of millions of links! After all, a link farm full of links fills their search results with spam. hmmmm. But if their system is automated and efficient they would relish link farms for sources of sites to index, wouldn't they? And if this ban is such a certainty, sign up your competitor in a link farm (you didn't hear that here).

The crux of Network Solution's article seems to be about the poor quality of link farms. That factor would seem to be the major issue to search engines. Indexing good quality links improves their search results. Indexing a bunch of trash does nothing for them and even makes them worse (if their algorithms are wrong). So if Bungee Bones human editing produces an exceptionally high quality directory then logically the search engines would be racing to it to get the links.

The Network Solutions article does little to define what, exactly, constitutes a "link farm". Is every list of website links a link farm? If so, the two largest directories (Yahoo and DMOZ) are link farms but we know their use is and always has been a beneficial addition, if not the actual foundation, of the internet. Search engines themselves use DMOZ as sources of their links.

But, if after considering all these points you are still concerned about being construed as a link farm we do provide a number of protections.

We create custom, dynamic metagtag information for each website using phrases supplied by the webmaster. Each page and website appears unique to search engines. Then, reciprocal webmasters also have the choice to either display free links or not. If they choose to display them then they have the choice of varying length time periods to display new free links for. This results in a large variance in the links that appear on each site.

BungeeBones does not do any of these things in order to boost search engine rankings. We are a human edited directory and it is the quality of the sites that we are pursuing. The traffic it generates is from the recycling of traffic among its members. Any boost in search engine traffic is incidental to those results.