Link farm

A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a web search engine (sometimes called spamdexing).

Search results were produced from the primary index, which was limited to approximately 100 million listings.

Inktomi was targeted for manipulation through link farms because it was then used by several independent but popular search engines.

Link farming was adapted to help increase the PageRank of member pages.

Link farm managers had to implement quality controls and monitor member compliance with their rules to ensure fairness.

In September 2014, Google targeted private blog networks (PBNs) with manual action ranking penalties.

The created blog forms part of a network because it uses either a subdomain or a subfolder of the main domain, although in all other ways it can be entirely autonomous.