Search engines used to rank sites based entirely on keyword content, so one could easily achieve a high ranking by cramming lots of keywords into a page, regardless of the page’s relevance to those keywords. It was common practice to make this text seemingly invisible by doing things such as making it the same color as the background and placing it off to the side or even putting it in a div that does not display (using the “display: none” property).

Google first pioneered a new search technology that included the number of backlinks in ranking. That was supposed to be a sign of popularity, and thus relevance to a particular keyword topic. Backlinks refer to links back to your website from other pages around the web. This spawned a new method of cheating search results known as link farms. Link farms are websites that are nothing more than massive collections of links. The idea behind link farms was to simply submit your website URL to a directory service that then posts your link on hundreds of pages.

As search engines further evolved, they caught on to these useless websites (the link farms) that were polluting search results and pointing users to irrelevant websites. Search engines like Google began to include link quality in the algorithm for determining ranking based on backlinks, which gets link farms marked as spam and thus reflects negatively on the rank of a page that appears on the link farms. In addition, repeat offenders can even find themselves banned from a search engine entirely for attempting to abuse page ranking algorithms.

It may seem like a temptingly easy solution to SEO (search engine optimization) for your website, but increasing your page rank is best left to qualified professionals who know what they’re doing and won’t lie to you about what they can do for your website.