What is a “Link Farm”, and how and why you should avoid them

I think something which I believe a lot of people have been struggling with, is knowing when
a paid link is a "good website".

In other words when it doesn't look like a spammy link farm.

What is a “good” paid target?

Here is a real life example of a link that one of our clients got.

They paid $85 for a link on this page: https://shanebarker.com/blog/b2b-marketing-

tools/#B2B_Marketing_Tool_17_LeadsRx

Now it’s part of a roundup and is a good site, but apart from this, look around the site and
you can see that it is actually a good site. it has good metrics (although metrics doesn't
really mean anything), but it also has good traffic.

Above all else, it looks REAL. In other words, owned by a real company or person, it’s likely
that people actually visit this website and read the content and its ok quality.
Look Shane is a real person!

This is when you know a site is good quality.

What is a “bad” paid target? (i.e. link farm)

With some clients we may be ok to use crappier links, but the kind of clients we are dealing
with now, we probably can't keep getting away with that, and should be looking at some
patterns.

Compare it to this site: https://www.startup-buzz.com/ and you see what i mean (although
even this isn't the worst site I've seen)

Scroll down, and I can see business related articles, one about plastic surgery, something
about Indo-Pak business political relations... all kinds of mixed up stuff!!!
And sure, it may be registering some traffic and metrics seem good, but if you want to dig
in, look where it comes from:

The traffic is coming from all kinds of random stuff, and its only because there's probably
thousands of posts, that it is of course, going to pick up some random bits of traffic because
of how big the site is -but that doesn't mean its a quality site.

Why do these spammy sites exist and why avoid them?

They are sites made ONLY for the purpose of enticing people to write a paid article for them
or to buy links from them. They sell links to EVERYONE, and don’t care about the quality of
the article or links, because the site probably has barely any humans reading it. Therefore,
the site becomes toxic and low quality (because Google sees they have bad content and low
engagement), and therefore it passes this toxicity onto the sites its linking out to.

That’s why we can’t buy these links!

So what we need to do, is look for these "patterns" and identify when we know (usually you
get a gut feeling in 5 seconds), if a site is good quality or not. Paid doesn't always = bad. But
some of them should be avoided if we can.