What Is Link Farming in SEO?
You have had the email. Somebody offering links, guest posts or placements, usually for a modest fee, usually with a list of impressive-sounding sites. This page answers whether that offer is a problem, then deals with the much larger anxiety the industry has built around links you never asked for.
You Have Had The Email
Every business with a website receives these. An offer of links, a guest post, a placement on a site you half recognise, a fee that seems small against what is promised. Most owners have wondered at some point whether to take one.
Why they are convincing. They sound like marketing.
The language is professional, the sites listed sound plausible and the price is low enough not to require a decision. Nothing about the offer announces itself as risky, which is the whole design.
What the offer actually is. A manufactured reference.
Somebody is proposing to arrange for other sites to point at yours in exchange for money. That is the entire transaction, however it is described. The rest of this page is about why that matters.
Why this page starts here. It is the real question.
Most writing on link risk opens with definitions. The actual question people arrive with is whether to reply to something in their inbox, so that is answered first and again at the end.
The short version. No.
If you want the reasoning, it follows. If you do not, ignoring it is almost always correct and block nine explains why replying makes things worse. Nothing in that answer depends on the particular offer in front of you. That is worth knowing before you spend time assessing it on its merits.
What A Link Scheme Actually Is
Any arrangement whose purpose is to manufacture links rather than to earn them. Link spam is one of the named areas in Google's published spam policies for web search. The attributed account of that sits on the Google spam policy page.
The thing that defines it. The arrangement, not the money.
People assume payment is what makes a link a scheme. It is not. An exchange, a reciprocal arrangement, a network of sites under common control or a bulk agreement with a publisher are all arrangements. None needs an invoice to qualify.
Why purpose is the test. Consistent with the rest of the policies.
Published policy describes what practices do rather than how they are done. So the question is not what form the arrangement took. It is whether the link exists because somebody chose to reference you or because somebody agreed to.
What that excludes. Ordinary business relationships.
A supplier listing you, a trade body listing its members, a local paper covering something you did. Those are references somebody chose to give. The fact that a commercial relationship exists does not turn them into a scheme.
How links are legitimately earned. Not this page's subject.
That belongs to our backlinks material, which covers what a genuine link building service looks like. This page deals with what goes wrong.
Paid Links
Paying for a link intended to influence rankings is against published policy. That is a factual statement about the terms on which a search engine operates rather than a judgement about anybody's character.
What separates advertising from a scheme. Disclosure.
Paid placement is an ordinary part of commerce and always has been. What published policy expects is that a paid link is marked as such, so that it is understood as advertising rather than counted as an editorial reference.
Where the risk lands. On the site receiving the link.
This is the part buyers are rarely told. The consequence of a link scheme attaches to the site being pointed at, which is yours. The seller has no exposure worth mentioning and moves on to the next customer.
Why the seller is comfortable. They are not carrying it.
Somebody offering you links is proposing a risk they do not hold. That is not necessarily deceitful and it structurally guarantees a different answer from the one you would reach yourself.
The uncomfortable adjacent case. Historical work.
Many sites carry paid links from arrangements that ended years ago, agreed by people who have left, under norms that were common at the time. That is an inherited situation rather than a current decision. Block seven covers when it actually matters.
Farms And Networks
Collections of sites existing principally to link to others. Described here by what they produce rather than by how they are assembled, which is deliberate.
What they are for. Volume.
They exist to produce large numbers of links quickly, which is the only thing they can offer, since nobody reads them. The output is quantity in a system that was designed to measure choice. That mismatch is the whole of the problem: the system is trying to count how many people decided you were worth mentioning. A farm supplies a number without any deciding behind it.
Why they are detectable. Patterns are the whole job.
Finding patterns across the web is what search engines are built to do. We publish nothing about how detection works. The relevant point for a buyer is that this is a heavily studied category rather than a clever secret. The people selling it know that.
The argument that matters more than risk. They are worth nothing.
Even where a network is not actively harming a site, a link from it carries no value. Nobody visits it, nobody clicks the link and there is no reference being recorded. You are paying for an entry in a database.
Why that argument is stronger. It does not depend on being caught.
The risk framing invites a calculation about probability. The value framing removes the calculation, because there is nothing on the other side of it.
Affiliate Links Are Not The Problem
Affiliate arrangements are legitimate commercial relationships and a normal affiliate site is not at risk. This gets asked constantly by businesses doing nothing wrong, so it is worth saying without hedging.
Why the worry exists. Money is involved.
People read that paying for links is against policy, notice that affiliate links involve payment and conclude they have a problem. The two situations are not alike. The worry tends to arrive from businesses running perfectly ordinary arrangements they have disclosed properly for years.
What the difference is. Direction and purpose.
An affiliate link exists so that a sale can be attributed and a commission paid. It is not an arrangement to influence rankings, which is the thing published policy addresses.
What is expected. Disclosure and appropriate attributes.
Affiliate relationships should be disclosed to readers. Affiliate links should carry the appropriate link attributes so they are understood correctly. That is standard practice rather than a remedy. The implementation detail belongs with our technical material.
Where affiliate sites do meet policy. A different issue entirely.
Thin affiliate pages are a named policy area. That concerns pages carrying product content with nothing added rather than the links themselves. A site with genuine reviews, comparisons or expertise is not what that describes.
Toxic Backlinks Are Oversold
An industry has been built on selling toxic link reports, monitoring and cleanup services. Most sites acquire odd links naturally and are not harmed by them. There is a mechanism behind that rather than merely an opinion.
The mechanism. Disregarded rather than counted against you.
Since the Penguin 4.0 update in 2016, the approach to low quality links shifted from demoting sites that had them towards disregarding the links themselves. A link that is ignored cannot damage the site it points at.
What a toxicity score actually is. Somebody's estimate.
These scores are a vendor's own judgement about a link. No search engine publishes a toxicity measure, so the number is an opinion expressed numerically, which is considerably more persuasive than the same opinion expressed as a sentence.
Why sites accumulate odd links anyway. Nobody controls who links to them.
Scrapers, directories, aggregators and abandoned sites all point at things. Every established site has a proportion of these and almost none of them mean anything. A site with none at all would be more unusual than a site with several hundred, which is worth remembering when a report presents a long list as though it were a finding.
What the reports are useful for. A narrow purpose.
Knowing roughly what your link profile looks like is reasonable. Treating a list of flagged links as a task list is what turns a report into a cost. Block eight explains why acting on it can make things worse.
When It Genuinely Matters
Three situations where links are a real problem. Outside these, the default position in the previous block holds. A page that only reassured would be as useless as one that only alarmed.
A manual action naming them. The definite case.
If the report states an issue with links pointing at your site, that is not a theory. There is a stated reason, a defined scope and a process, all covered in what is a Google manual action.
A history of paid link building. Known rather than suspected.
Where a business or a previous agency actually bought links, that is a candidate worth investigating properly. Knowing it happened is different from wondering whether it did.
An inherited site with a known scheme behind it. The acquisition case.
A site bought from somebody whose methods you now doubt is worth examining before it becomes your problem. It belongs in due diligence rather than in a panic afterwards.
What all three share. Evidence.
Each begins with something known rather than with a report suggesting something might be wrong. That distinction decides whether investigating is diligence or anxiety. It is the same test the rest of this cluster applies to unexplained falls.
What is not on this list. A fall you cannot explain.
An unexplained drop is not evidence of a link problem. Treating it as one is covered in what is a negative SEO attack.
Disavow Is A Last Resort, Not Hygiene
The disavow tool exists for a narrow purpose. It is used routinely, defensively and as a monthly task by businesses who would be better off leaving it alone. This page publishes no instructions for using it.
What it was made for. Stated at launch.
When Google introduced the tool in October 2012, the position was that where a site has been notified of a manual action for unnatural links it can help address the issue. Google added that where no such notification has been received it is generally not something to worry about.
What routine use costs. Links that were helping.
Disavowing a list of flagged links means discarding whatever value they carried. Some of those will be genuine references somebody chose to give. There is no undo that restores what they were contributing.
Why the mechanism argument matters here. It is usually redundant.
If low quality links are already being disregarded, disavowing them changes nothing while risking the ones that were not. That is a poor trade to make repeatedly.
The default. Leave it alone.
Unless one of the three situations in block seven applies, the correct action is none. If one does apply, this is specialist work rather than a monthly routine. The reason we publish no walkthrough is that anybody who needs one should not be doing it unaided.
What To Do With The Email
Ignore it. That is the whole answer. The reasons are worth having, because they also cover the next forty you receive.
Why replying makes it worse. A reply is data.
Responding, even to decline, confirms a person reads that address. Addresses that answer are worth more than addresses that do not. They get traded accordingly.
Why no legitimate opportunity arrives this way. The economics.
Somebody with genuinely valuable placement does not need to send unsolicited email to strangers at volume. The approach itself tells you what is being sold.
What about the ones that look personal. They are not.
Mentioning your business name, your town or a page on your site is straightforward to automate. Apparent effort is not evidence of a real approach.
The one exception worth reading. Somebody already linking to you.
An email from a site that has actually referenced you, about that reference, is a real conversation. It is also rare enough that it stands out immediately.
If you have already taken one. Not an emergency.
A small number of arrangements is not the situation block seven describes. Stop, do not disavow reflexively, then read the dangerous SEO practices guide before spending anything.
Before you
disavow
anything.
A review of what actually points at your site and whether any of it warrants action, which for most businesses it does not. We will tell you plainly if we find nothing worth removing, because a report full of flagged links is not the same as a problem.
What a risk review covers:
A risk review is a one-off piece of work rather than a monthly service, so it is scoped against the size of the site and how much history it carries.
Every guide.
One practice.
Black hat, grey hat, link risk, thin content, the spam policies, negative SEO, manual actions, algorithmic penalties, how to check for one and how to recover from one.
