Ok I think its appropriate for me to share this story at this time after being warned by numerous forums members I decided to say screw it and went and started using link farm software, Gotlinks, Index Guy Links, Link DIY and one other I can't remember, I used all three of these and ended up getting myself De-indexed by MSN, first it went up to over 6,000 links from 4,000 and since then my rank for certain keywords began dropping and my position in the search engine started dropping, Just letting everyone know not to take the easy want out because at first it might look like success but your not the first to try and think you'll slip through the cracks or the first to think using just 1 or two won't hurt, stay far away from link farming This is a Warning unless you want all your hard work to go out the window, their is only 1 way to get up in the engines and its by doing it the Horrible tough honest way. Good Luck to all. Also Be warned that you can even get banned by certain engines if you keep it up.
lol if your domain is less than 2 months old Yahoo and Google will penalize your site and won't even index the pages but I had no problems with MSN with Gotlinks. I could understand someone getting banned from google and maybe Yahoo but your site had to be pretty spammy to get banned by MSN. Customizing your link pages would help as well.
Link farms will get you banned in the long run. You may enjoy some good ranking for a short time but then the axe gets dropped. I only ever do my own link building and do it all manually. No link farms and no automated submission scripts.
I had got links on a site, I didn't really get harmed but I took it off, becasue it didn't seem to help enough to be worth the risk
Any reciporical link directory could be considered a link farm and with the changes to Gotlinks they conform more with the rules. The linking is no longer automatic. I checked out the other two. Link Diy is useless because they only allow one Anchor text. Gotlinks allows 5 different anchor text.
Would using a service like Linkmarket count as linkfarming (assuming one only accepted content-relevant links)? <nervously> I'm not too familiar with that term.
Like I said, I just do my own link building. I submit to directories, write and submit articles. I also try to have good original content so that people will want to link to me.
Yeah, I never looked at gotlinks as a long term investment. I just got tired of getting almost no hits to my site. I was thinking about buying Article submission software as it seems like it would be a much safer way to gain fast links. Has submitting articles actually helped you that much?
An automatic link exchange is not a link farm if it has certain features that you can control. Look for these: 1. Proper categorization of links 2. Ability to control who you link to. Don't just automatically link to anyone that signs up. 3. Variable anchor text and description. This will display different content in different directories. Other pluses are: 4. Link Exchange Fraud check. Watch out for tampering with robots.txt, nofollow/noindex, etc... 5. Gradual Link release. This will slowly release the links according to your comfort zone. So you will not get thousands of links overnight. 6. Multi-way linking if they have it. Reciprocal may become the past soon. 7. Choose a smaller network if you are concerned about "spammy". But there is no proof of "spammy" even with the larger networks. Just look at these proofs PR4, PR5 PR4 examples. If you look hard enough into the directory, there are PR6, etc... Once you have achieve these PR, you can sell text links if you want. . If they are spammy, they would not be at PR5 PR4. Many Automatic Link Exchange users may not be using the system correctly, or something else is causing the issue. Like any other tool, incorrect usage may lead to undesired results. Those who have not used it are scared away by speculators who did not post any conclusive proof of proper usage leading to undesired result. First of all, never accept links from all members by default. If you do this, it is basically saying you will accept the risk to link to anyone including shady sites. I'm sure in a manual link exchange, you always check your partners very carefully. Lastly, there are several "Automatic services" mentioned through the forum and they are not all the same. Don't use any Automatic Link exchange service that does not allow you to control who you link to.
if you care about your site don't use those automatic link exchange programs, if you have a testing site, go ahead and have fun
If you are going to do reciprocal linking. Then set your directory up as a resource that your readers will actually enjoy. Give them a multiple of categories directly related to your topic. Make it a resource they can use. Then you cant really fall foul. If you go and add everything every which way. Then eventually it is going to come back and bite you. Brad