Link Farm vs Resource list

Sabre0001

Just wondering if search engines see a difference or will my site (and others that are being linked to) suffer as a result. With eSports.ie I am hoping to promote sites that are doing good work, that are worth checking out if people are interested in the area of competitive gaming or sites that are good resources for those that are new to the scene.

For myself, I have a list of "resources". I was hoping to publish these as an article on site (under a menu item - "links") but now I am unsure. The purpose of the page is not malicious, nor is it to boost illegally...but I am concerned that there will be no difference seen.

Is there a way to build such a resource list so that it is seen in a positive light (by search engines, etc. rather than users)? Or is it a futile exercise and people will have to learn on their own? Thanks!

link8r

Sabre0001 wrote: »

Just wondering if search engines see a difference or will my site (and others that are being linked to) suffer as a result. With eSports.ie I am hoping to promote sites that are doing good work, that are worth checking out if people are interested in the area of competitive gaming or sites that are good resources for those that are new to the scene.

For myself, I have a list of "resources". I was hoping to publish these as an article on site (under a menu item - "links") but now I am unsure. The purpose of the page is not malicious, nor is it to boost illegally...but I am concerned that there will be no difference seen.

Is there a way to build such a resource list so that it is seen in a positive light (by search engines, etc. rather than users)? Or is it a futile exercise and people will have to learn on their own? Thanks!

Outward linking is a basic function of the web - that's how people jump to new sites and discover new sites. Having no outbound links would definitely be a bad thing.

Lots of sites have Links pages - it's very "web 1.0". Nowadays its more common to see links all over a site rather than set in a specific resources page but unless you have hundreds of links I can't see why you'd be seen as negative. Google still indexes big directories with little/no authority with thousands of links and millions of pages!

I would be surprised if your site could be seen as a spam farm.

If you are worried then you can also put a no-index and/or no-follow tags to show that you do not wish to pass authority to other sites - used for paid links etc but I think you would have to be building links at an epic scale (think 1000 people slaving away for a month in a cheap Asian link-sweat-shop) to merit any interest

Disclaimer: this is not fact and is only my opinion based on observations and thought. other users may have other opinions and I welcome their views.

RedCardinal

I agree with link8tr. Generally a "link farm" is a closed network of sites which only link to themselves. What you're doing is helping users by pointing to useful resources, which is generally how the web works. I really wouldn't worry about this personally.

Derek B

A concept which I find quite intriguing is trustrank - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrustRank

If you can get a couple of links from 'reputable' sites to yours, your trustrank should be positively impacted

Also, for it to be a link farm, all/most of the other sites would need to be linking back to yours. It doesn't sound like this will be the case, as you said you are "hoping to promote sites that are doing good work"