Link farms.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  George Katsoudas: Hello Kind Community,
  Please be nice as i'm a newbie here so apologies in advance for the dumb question :)
  
  My Question is:
  What would be the effect on a persons SEO website ranking if they had set up 500 non identical sites with different URLs about the same topic with the header in each site being the same image and the menu options point back to the original site?
  
  Q1: Would they get banned eventually?
  Q2: I know this is a grey area, what are the communities thoughts on this concept?
  Q3:  ;Has anyone ever done it?
  
  Cheers
  George
   ;
   ;
• 
  Jim Munro: Hi +George Katsoudas.You are welcome here. :)
  
  Q1: I'm not an expert, George, but I think I can say with confidence that you are likely to crash and burn.
  
  Q2: I don't think it's a grey area. It's an exploit that would be easy to identify.
  
  Q3: People do this without considering whether googlebot came to be earning $5-6M an hour by being easily fooled.
• 
  promoz seo: Bound to get a hit.
  If those are expired domain links back to your money site then you are at high risk. Google recently updated & penalized PBN (private blog network) sites.
  If those 499 sites are not expired domains then too, you are going to be penalized because those links are completely unnatural. I did not know any site, not even saw any super authority site which got that much links from the header or menu or footer section from same niche sites.
  Moreover your competitor sites can report against you on Google for different reasons (spam site or link seller).
• 
  Rotimi Orimoloye: lol.
  Nothing "grey" about this though.
  500 entire websites "unnaturally" linking to one site....
  That is as black as it gets. lol
  ;)
• 
  Gregory Kristan: Pitch Black SEO
• 
  George Katsoudas: Hey guy's that's the exact response I had when my client put the same question to me.
  
  Then he pulls out his laptop out and shows me some examples.
  
  So I thought more about it. For example.
  
  Look at a financial company. 25 credit card products. They create 4 landing pages each product for Christmas promotions and target markets. All on unique new domain names. All pages link back to their main products page all marketing pages use the same header image for branding. These pages and the main product page rank.
  
  But if a small business were to do it they would be penalized.
  
  So why do the big guys get away with it over a small company with good traffic ? 
• 
  Gregory Kristan: As someone who did work at a big company I can answer this with some real insight. ;
  
  If you get caught and penalized and you have a lot of money, then you are able to get through the process faster with the Google Webspam team. Basically if you want to pay 30k or more for someone to really look at your site and help you get de penalized you can.
  
  Believe me, i was shocked when I found this out.
• 
  Jim Munro: I think there's a difference between a company with genuine needs to quarantine certain content from their sites and an attempt by a small business to artificially game the system. I think googlebot is old enough and clever enough to discern that difference.
  
  +Alistair Lattimore ;might have insights on this question. I think I can remember +John Mueller ;giving a reasonable answer to this question too, but I cannot find it.
• 
  George Katsoudas: Hey guys really appreciate your honesty.