Link farming

bhickey

A friend of mine who's involved in construction has a website and earlier in the year he was fooled into taking on a website "marketing" crowd. Their only contribution to the site in that time has been to add a Links page that links to 60+ of their other customers' sites. These other sites have no relevance whatsoever to the construction industry or to any of the content on my friend's site. This website "marketing" crowd seem to do the same thing on their other customers' sites and have obviously over the years built up a substantial portfolio of small sites that can they use for this link farming.

Question is - should I remove all irrelevant outbound links from my friend's site and also ask nicely for all irrelevant inbound links to be removed from other sites in case Google is frowning on this link farming practice?

Reading up on it, it does seem that Google discourage this sort of link farming practice but I'm curious as to whether ye think it would be doing actual harm or whether I should just leave it be? Thanks.

tricky D

It's bad. Google regard this as spam and quite rightly penalise. It's been like this for about a decade.

Moonstar

Remove irrelevant outbound links from the site, there's not a lot you can do about the incoming ones but you shouldn't be too penalised for these as you have no control over who links to you.

Your friend should try to get inbound links by directly contacting other sites that are complementary to his business (not necessarily competitors though).