Why Link Farming is Bad for SEO?

The process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase search engine optimization  in digital marketing. The idea behind link farming is to increase the number of sites that link to yours.

In theory, the more sites that link to yours, the higher your ranking in the search engine results will be because the more links indicate a higher level of popularity among users of the Internet.

However, search engines such as Google consider link farming as a form of spam and have been implementing procedures to banish sites that participate in link farming, so the term link farming has garnered negative connotations across the Internet.

Link farms were originated in response to Google’s ranking algorithm, PageRank. PageRank thinks of links as votes, where a page linking to another page is casting a vote. Therefore, pages with the most links were deemed valuable. Link farms were created to help increase PageRank, however, in recent times, Google and other search engines have adapted their algorithms to prevent link farms from appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Web sites that have created link farms can be penalized by Google and other search engines.

Link farming is considered a “black hat” method of search engine optimization (SEO) because the content on the web sites linking to each other is often not related, not created by a human (it can be created using programs or services) and is often of a very low quality. Search engines can detect link farms easily and they shouldn’t be seen as a legitimate long-term search optimization strategy.

Source : School of Digital Marketing