When will link farms and back sites be penalized or when will the website using them as backlinks be penalized?

[Deacyde]

After doing some backlink searching on competitors, I see a great deal of competitor's backlinks are obvious linkfarms and just completely unrelated to their field. Also I see a lot of forum comments using links are showing as backlinks, upon inspecting the html element I see they're " no follow " links. Why are they showing up as backlinks with link equity then?

[MattRoney]

Hi Deacyde! When you say they're showing as backlinks with link equity, do you mean they're showing up in Open Site Explorer? And would you be able to share the URL you're trying to analyze along with a few examples of the strange nofollow links?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

I wish anybody can give you an answer to your question about when linkfarmers are going to harvest their fruits. But nobody knows. Not even Google. They've been talking about it for years and there are still "succesfull" link farms and such. I believe that since lots of google's algorithms use a lot of self-learning, nowadays even google themselves don't really know what exactly is happening

As for different types of links, here:

• Equity-Passing (formerly follow) - Typically links which pass value from one page to another, including followed, 301, and meta refresh links
• Non-Equity Passing (formerly nofollow) - Typically links that are nofollowed or don't send value (rel=nofollow , meta nofollow, off screen, 302, RSS feed)
• Only rel=nofollow  - Links that have the rel=nofollow attribute
• Only Follow - Links that don't have the rel=nofollow attribute, but still may not pass equity (i.e. 302 links and meta nofollows would be returned)
• Only 301 - Links that are only specifically 301 links

Cheers.

[Deacyde]

Certainly and thanks for responding.

1st off, yes, these were found checking OSE for competitors.

For one example goto - http://clanofthecats.com/comic/filler-7/comment-page-1/ and search the page for " bathroom stalls " then inspect that element you'll see it says " nofollow " however, this url was only found by me doing a competitor search and searching " link equity " " external " .

Was wondering if this was just a case of them using the follow linking at one point and then the webmaster of that site changed them to nofollow and this is just an artifact.

[Deacyde]

Thanks for responding, I know that it's a bit of wishful thinking on the part of a time frame things will take place. It's just such a blackeye to see these linkfarms helping competitors rank when they aren't being relevant or useful.

As well seeing places like BBB do some follow backlinking while telling new customers they're " phasing " it out, while keeping the follow links where they are for who knows how long is very frustrating, specially since competitors are sucking that precious link life blood.

In niche markets, backlinks are more valuable than gold.