Link farms have long been a popular way for some SEO’s to try to improve their search engine rankings. In the past year, “like” farms have been on the rise. A “like” farm is when you pay a company to acquire a mass amount of “likes” to a post or company on Facebook, Google, or any social network site. The hope is that by getting a lot of likes, the search engine rankings for the site will increase.
But a recent post by officials from Bing, the search engine that hopes to give Google a run for its money, indicates that likes are being largely ignored by the search engines. “In most cases, if we spot like farm activity, we simply ignore the signal,” said Duane Forrester in his post. “Again, you may have paid for a service which is bringing you no value in boosting your search results.”
And don’t think the search engines can’t find the ‘like farms.’ Those farms have a pattern, Forrester writes. “Anyone could suddenly “go viral” and accumulate a lot of likes very quickly, so we look beyond just like/time to find patterns,” Forrester writes. “And if there is one thing a search engine is good at, it’s seeing patterns online. Like farms tend to be built around a core network of accounts. You pay someone to like your site, content or whatever, and they go out across their network and like you. Its artificial and we know it.”
Does this mean that you shouldn’t tell your friends not to like your site or content? No. If someone really likes you, by all means they should click the “like” button. But don’t count on those hundreds of likes to get you to page one of the search engine rankings.
As Forrester said at the close of his blog, quality wins every time.
“Quality links, from quality websites,” Forrester said. “Quality social signals from a quality program. You may think you’re saving time with short cuts such as link farms and like farms, but be assured, our short cuts are much faster. We simply ignore the results of spammy tactics. Invest your time and money in a quality-centric approach and you’ll have much more success.”
This article has been republished to
www.ixlstudios.com from www.morevisibility.com