Link Farming came about in the late 90′s as a means of taking advantage of Inktomi’s method of ranking based on link popularity. Link farming later become known as spamdexing – and is frowned upon by search engine’s today.
Having a solid link strategy for your web site is important. Knowing the types of links that will provide value to your site, and your users and reciprocating with those types of web sites will provide a greater value to all parties involved.
Search engines such as Google still appear to place value in ranking on the number of incoming links your website possesses, but know that it is more important that these incoming links are now relevant.
Consider this – when you look at a links page on a web site and instantly find that there are hundreds of links that don’t seem related in any way to each other, or to the site you are on – frankly that to me is a useless links or resources page. I dont want to see “make a million dollars working from home”, or “buy foreclosures for $10″ on a site that is selling crown moulding. These links provide absolutely no value… They are not resources, in fact it’s really just spam.
If I’m looking at a woodworking site perhaps searching for crown moulding or some related product and find that I want to see what other resources this company might recommend – like stain products for the moulding they sell – those are the types of links you should hope (or expect) to find on a resources page on a well thought out web site.
When putting together a link strategy – consider who is using your web site and what they are looking for. If you sell a certain product, and there are other products that you don’t sell that compliment your product – seek out relevant links to those types of companies.
You can build relevant relationships through effective linking – and drive relevant traffic to your site as a result. After you’ve established some of these relationships – keep an eye on the analytics data from your incoming links – this may give you some ideas on some targeted marketing through various channels of high traffic sites that do drive traffic to your site.
You will reap what you sew when it comes to linking to/from your website – so think through your link strategy carefully.
Happy Farming! 
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Given that Google is becoming more and more sophisticated in their algorithms and given that they seem to be putting up walls to stop SEO tricks – I wonder if those bad links you spoke of can hurt our clients’ sites. I hope not, because they occur without any effort on my part or my client’s. I found http://www.detroitbandsaw.com – who sell saws and blades – with a link from Briteny Sprear’s search engine. I found a link to http://www.loadmasterscale.com – who sell industrial and commercial scales – with a link from Fashion Bug.
Hi, cool post. I have been wondering about this topic,so thanks for blogging. I’ll probably be subscribing to your site. Keep up great writing
hi wendy! great post. i’m just learning SEO and bumped to your website.