In graph-theoretic terms, a link farm is a clique. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a web search engine (sometimes called spamdexing). Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.

Search engines require ways to confirm page relevancy. A known method is to examine one-way links coming directly from relevant websites. The process of building links should not be confused with being listed on link farms, as the latter requires reciprocal return links, which often renders the overall backlink advantage useless. This is due to oscillation causing confusion over which is the vendor site and which is the promoting site.

History

Link farms were first developed by search engine optimizers (SEOs) in 1999 to take advantage of the Inktomi search engine's dependence upon link popularity. Although link popularity is used by some search engines to help establish a ranking order for search results, the Inktomi engine at the time maintained two indexes.

Search results were produced from the primary index, which was limited to approximately 100 million listings. Pages with few inbound links fell out of the Inktomi monthly.

Inktomi was targeted for manipulation through link farms because it was then used by several independent but popular search engines. Yahoo!, then the most popular search service, also used Inktomi results to supplement its directory search feature. The link farms helped stabilize listings, primarily for online business websites that had few natural links from larger, more stable sites in the Inktomi index.

Link farm exchanges were at first handled on an informal basis, but several service companies were founded to provide automated registration, categorization, and link page updates to member websites.

When the Google search engine became popular, search engine optimizers learned that Google's ranking algorithm depended in part on a link-weighting scheme called PageRank. Rather than simply count all inbound links equally, the PageRank algorithm determines that some links may be more valuable than others, and therefore assigns them more weight than others. Link farming was adapted to help increase the PageRank of member pages.

However, the link farms became susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous webmasters who joined the services, received inbound linkage, and then found ways to hide their outbound links or avoid posting any links on their sites at all. Link farm managers had to implement quality controls and monitor member compliance with their rules to ensure fairness.

Alternative link farm products emerged, particularly link-finding software that identified potential reciprocal link partners, sent them template-based emails offering to exchange links, and created directory-like link pages for Websites, in the hope of building their link popularity and PageRank. These link farms are sometimes considered a spamdexing strategy.

Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filtering those pages from indexing and search results. In some cases, entire domains were removed from the search engine indexes to prevent them from influencing search results.