My site http://www.zodiacart.com recently dropped from a PR of 5 to a
PR of 4 even though I have been working hard at obtaining high ranking
relevant links. What's most confusing is that Google found 138
incoming links since last April but now only sees 48 links. Most of
the links dropped by google were really good, legitimate ones and they
still exist. I did add my site to several link only sites that relate to my
site's topics- astrology, and unique gifts not realizing that this is
harmful to my page rank. Should I get myself removed from these "link
farms" and do you think this will help my situation? Can you define
"link farm" for me?

Hello Zodiacart,

Your inclusion in link farms, however accidental, may indeed be
harmful to your page rank:

"Of late, Google has been banning sites which are members of link
farms. The reason is simple - Google's algorithm depends to a large
extent on link popularity. Hence, any product or service which can
artificially boost the link popularity of sites can wreak havoc on
Google's ability to rank the most relevant sites first. Thus, it is
perfectly logical for Google to start banning sites which are members
of such link farms."

Link Popularity Don'ts, Yahoo! and Niche Sites, Cloaking
http://www.searchengineguide.com/1stsearchranking/2001/0814_1st1.html

"Google insists that cheaters can only ruin the search tool for the
rest of us. And in fact, if link farms can artificially inflate the
rankings of less-than-useful Web sites, we will all start seeing
Google search results that miss the mark. Thus, Google is constantly
updating PageRank to fend off optimizers.

Google publishes a list of guidelines suggesting legitimate ways to
improve a site's ranking—to make the site better. Among the tips:
"Make pages for users, not for search engines." They also warn of
illegitimate optimizations that could result in a site being dropped
from Google's index: "Don't participate in link schemes designed to
increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links
to Web spammers or 'bad neighborhoods' on the Web, as your own ranking
may be affected adversely by those links."

Fooling Google
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article/0,3048,a=40144,00.asp

What's a "link farm"?

"Link Farms are SPAMMING! Google has officially let everybody know
that if you participate in a link farm you will find yourself banned
from the engine so fast your head will spin. A link farm is basically
where you submit your site to a site that has hundreds of links, the
add your link and in exchange you put there list on your website. This
is a link farm, and it is not worth being banned over."

Search engine Google tips
http://www.easywebsitepromotion.com/website-promotion/search-engine-google-tips.htm

However, this doesn't mean that's the complete solution to your
problem.  Much of your Page Rank is actually completely out of your
control - Page Rank is determined not only by the relevance and
popularity of your page, but the relevance and popularity of the pages
linking to you as well.  Changes made to pages linking to you which
cause *their* Page Rank to drop may also cause *your* Page Rank to
drop:

"We update our index every four weeks. Each time we update our
database of web pages, our index invariably shifts: We find new sites,
we lose some sites, and sites ranking may change. Your rank naturally
will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. You can be
assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost
the ranking of a site. Google's order of results is automatically
determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm.
Please check out our "Why Use Google" page for more information on how
this works."

Why does my page's rank keep changing?
://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html

Reasons for pages linking to you experiencing a drop in Page Rank can
include the pages being inaccessible at the time the Googlebot visits
(server downtime), changes in the page's content, and pages linking to
*that* page experiencing a drop in Page Rank.

To help keep your site in tip-top shape, Google suggests:

"# Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page
should be reachable from at least one static text link.

# Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the
important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so
links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

# Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly
and accurately describe your content.

# Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make
sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

# Try to use text instead of images to display important names,
content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained
in images.

# Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.

# Check for broken links and correct HTML.

# If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?'
character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls
dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters
short and the number of them small.

# Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than
100)."

Design and Content Guidelines
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

"# Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your
users, or present different content to search engines than you display
to users.

# Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule
of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done
to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask,
"Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't
exist?"

# Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's
ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or
"bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected
adversely by those links.

# Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check
rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate
our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products
such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries
to Google."

Quality Guidelines - Basic principles
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

For more information and to stay abreast of tips to help keep your PR
up where you'd like it, consider using the Google User Forum:

google.public.support.general
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general

I hope you find this information useful!  If I can be of further
assistance, please just ask for clarification.

--Missy

Search terms: [ "link farms" google ] and the Google help pages

---

Request for Answer Clarification by zodiacart-ga on 21 Jun 2003 12:52 PDT

Thanks for all the useful information. My adding links to these
"farms" was solely to advertise my site with an attractive banner to
web surfers. I can understand that this could interfere with an honest
calculation of a site's page rank. At the time I didn't even know what
page rank was!  If I remove myself from them will this be helpful the
next time Google spiders my website? Also, you didn't totally answer
my question which is why did I "lose" 90 links? Do the link pages
themselves require a certain criteria or page rank to be counted?These
were nearly all honest, relevant and quality links from other
websites. Is this just a period of adjustment? I'm hoping this is only
temporary.
Thanks again.

---

Clarification of Answer by missy-ga on 21 Jun 2003 13:19 PDT

Hello again!

Adding yourself to link farms without knowing that they're harmful is
a common mistake, so don't worry overmuch about it.  Get yourself out
of them, and give the Googlebot a couple crawls to see if it
recognizes the changes (remember, the index is updated only once every
four weeks - changes are not immediate and may take more than a single
cycle to show up).

There is, unfortunately, no definitive answer to why you "lost"
backward links.  Google is very clear in stating that they are under
no obligation to include any site in the index:

" We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make
any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear."

Submit your site
://www.google.com/addurl.html

Neither does Google guarantee that once any site is listed, it will
remain listed.

If any of these "missing links" are no longer listed in Google's
index, or were inaccessible the day the Googlebot came to visit, or
have a Page Rank of less than 4, they will no longer appear in your
list of sites linking to you:

"Google uses a proprietory system called Page Rank to rate the
popularity and relevancy of web pages. This algorithm assigns a Page
Rank value to each page. You can see an approximation of the Page Rank
assigned to pages by installing the Google toolbar. The feature that
lists incoming links is quite processor intensive, so Google reduces
the load on its servers by only listing inbound links with a PR
greater than 4. In other words, it only lists the more popular sites
linking to yours."

Link Popularity Checker FAQ
http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/link_popularity_checker_faq.asp

At the moment, there seems to be an extended "Google Dance" going on,
in which the new indexing results are shifted and the index is
re-built.  You may very well be experiencing a simple transition
period, but there really isn't any way to say for certain until the
new index is finished.

--Missy

Thanks for your help!