Date First Published: 4th September 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: SEO
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 5/10
Learn more about what a link scheme is in this article.
A link scheme, also known as a link farm, is a type of black hat link building that artificially boosts the ranking of a webpage through manipulation of the number of backlinks pointing to that page. This is because the number of backlinks pointing to a page is one of the main factors that search engines use to rank pages in the SERP page. Link schemes are only made for page ranking purposes rather than the intended purpose, which is recommending a useful page to users. Search engines view link schemes as a form of spam and have implemented procedures to penalise websites that unnaturally gain backlinks through link schemes.
Search engines can be vulnerable to link schemes as they originally determined that a page has a higher authority if lots of sites link to it. The algorithms of search engines have now improved to rank results based on what will be most useful to the user, meaning that a page with trustworthy content or similar content to the page it is linking to is much more valuable and assigns more authority than large numbers of random links from unrelated sites. Search engines dislike links between unrelated sites.
Examples of link schemes include:
No, participating in a link scheme is not recommended and should be avoided. People that engage in link schemes are more likely to get a penalty than a ranking boost and it often has the opposite effect. Link schemes are a black hat SEO technique and are against Google's webmaster guidelines. If Google detects a pattern of backlinks pointing to a website that seems unnatural or artificial, causing search results to show preferences for results not relevant to the user's queries, Google can apply a manual spam action against a website or a page, which is when a member of Google's team has determined that the pages on a website are against Google's webmaster guidelines. This can cause links to a website in Google's calculations to be demoted when calculating the ranking of a site.
Google will then provide instructions on how to fix this issue. A message like this will be sent to the webmaster, which can be seen below. Note that if someone paid another website to insert a link to their site and the artificial links got caught by Google, then all the money they spent on those backlinks would be wasted.
Link schemes can also create a bad user experience, since large numbers of links that take users to unrelated sites make a website look spammy and untrustworthy. Instead of trying to find ways to artificially build backlinks, it is best to naturally build them. Focusing on publishing high-quality content on a regular basis that people will want to share will encourage other websites and users to link to and recommend it, creating natural external links to a website. Note that building backlinks are not the only way of ranking higher in search engines. There are much more factors listed here.
Generally, linking to a website for purposes other than recommending it to users puts people into a link scheme. Paid links, ads, and sponsored links should use rel=nofollow, or ideally rel=sponsored, which is a new attribute introduced by Google, specifically designed for paid links. These instruct search engines to not crawl the URL or give the linked website authority or an external vote of confidence. Google can penalise sites with affiliate or paid links that aren't properly nofollowed for having unnatural outbound links to other websites since these links will artificially pass value to the linked website.
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