Link Schemes

Link Schemes


Link schemes are seen as irregular, unnatural and controlled linking patterns. Less direct cross linking methods with the sole purpose of letting participating web sites accumulate PageRank at a higher rate than they would do "naturally". Some systems utilize a network of affiliated web sites linking to each other to hide this tactic, but in the end show up in the records for constantly cross-referencing one another. The algorithms were designed to map such link networks, and evaluate them on the basis of how well established the participating web sites are. Should a network consist of an irregular amount of web sites with no actual unique content, no visitors or outside references, or redirect chains to obtain traffic and/or PageRank, "thin" sites with all reasons to assume they have been created but to support others with references ( and no other purpose ) these networks will sooner or later be flagged as Bad Neighbourhoods. Such links are often discarded or the participants penalized or banned from the index. Read more about Bad Neighborhoods.

Known issues


Sometimes a web site may be linking to or be linked from such link scheming networks without the webmaster knowingly participating. Some minor attention is needed at the least when link requests are made to and by webmasters, so that they can avoid the penalties that may arise from being a part of link schemes.

+ Resolution: You should avoid such linking tactics, assuming that the algorithms can map networks of such web sites, and not only discount their referring links, but also penalize or ban web sites that they were meant to support. On another note, if you see a sudden rise in the number of links pointing to your site which you believe to be from scraper sites, you should report these URLs to the Google Spam team. In case of accidental site-wide or excessive 3rd party linking to your pages, you should contact the webmaster of the site(s) which show the links, the ISP and in some cases the registrar of the domain name and request these references to be normalized or added a nofollow attribute. If the source pages will not change their behavior you should contact the Google Spam team to report the problem. Read more about Scraper sites and the rel="nofollow" attribute.