Hello, What exactly is a difference between link exchange and link farming. Should link exchange sites such as linkmarket.net etc be categorized as link farms? Thanks
There's an article on this page that explains why Link Vault (for example) is not a Link Farm... Cryo.
It isn't banned from Google search, and even if it was it wouldn't matter because the Link Vault website is not part of the network.
it is banned for google search. Search for link vault in Google and you won't find www.link-vault.com website there.
How it's banned ? Omg. It shows PR4 for me (banned sites show grey PR on toolbar), also type http://www.link-vault.com/ in Google it returns pages, as well as site:http://www.link-vault.com/ They just use adwords. That's why you may see them first when you type "link vault".
Sorry you are self serving and therefore biased. Link Vault is artificial link building, and as such links obtained in this method are discounted by Google, and perhaps Yahoo & MSN as they improve on their link scoring portion of their algorithms. Please read this unbiased article to better understand why any link program is worthless!! http://www.searchenginenews.com/ala...es_for_Building_and_Structuring_Inbound_Links
Link exchange services and link exchange software have been around for quite a while. Some 'search engine experts' claim they are a good method to increase the ranking of your website. However Google engineers are not sleeping. If you look into Google's Webmaster Guidelines you will find that Google suggest not to participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank and to particularly avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links." Read more about link exchange and PageRank here.
Link exchange services and link exchange software have been around for quite a while. Some 'search engine experts' claim they are a good method to increase the ranking of your website. However Google engineers are not sleeping. If you look into Google's Webmaster Guidelines you will find that Google suggest not to participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank and to particularly avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links." Read more about link exchange and PageRank here.
To answer your original question, I did a brief bit of research on Google. A link farm seems to have the following properties: links are placed in large quantities on a page with no other content the links are not categorised, and bare little relevance to the website the page of links is the duplicated on other websites link farms have few or no links to them links don't have decent anchors or descriptions In comparison, link exchange is about sharing a few links with related websites, on unique pages that have links to them and a bit of content (anchors/descriptions). [reference] Services like linkmarket.net and linkmetro.com are there to help you find partners to exchange links with. The links you place on your website are still under your control, and still have a chance of looking natural. Cryo.
Link exchange, can either be good or bad, Link farming is a method where a page is stuffed by links in which is not related to the site.
link exchange will be good if you'll link with related sites and better if you can link with quality and trusted sites...IMO link farming will do you no good....having links that isn't related to you will just hurt your site....
I don't think linking a non-related site would harm in any way, if cannot benefit anyone. I know a webmaster who own around 25 websites on all different topics totally, and all the sites are linked to each others from each page of each of sites. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
It depends on the site, you can have different topics in a page as long as you have a directory page or lets just say a page where different links are placed but they are categorized according to their theme.