== Blog networks are not link farms, and vice versa ==
There is no Wikipedia-acceptable reliable source that accurately describes the difference between a "blog network" and a "link farm". These articles have been challenged by some Wikipedians for not sourcing their statements of fact correctly, and that's just never going to happen because the people who created these spam systems don't publish academic papers, aren't profiled by the Wall Street Journal, and aren't considered reliable sources. A link farm is any group of Websites that all link to each other [regardless of whether they are blogs] for the purpose of manipulating or influencing search engine crawling, indexing, and/or ranking. The link farms were created by adding pages filled with links to existing Websites. They had nothing to do with blogging.
Link spammers turned to creating blog networks that sold home page backlinks after the link farms were killed off by the search engines. The blog networks did NOT all link to each other. They merely sold links to other sites. This article and the Link Farm article should not be using the terms interchangeably. That's like saying killer whales are sharks because they're both sea predators. [[User:Michael Martinez|Michael Martinez]] ([[User talk:Michael Martinez|talk]]) 05:30, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
Hey [[User:Michael Martinez|Michael Martinez]] - I think the edit that flagged your concern was one that I made, and it was not intended to cause trouble or make it so that this article was taking a stance on this. I noticed that "blog network" was linking to "link farm" and so I tried to call out clearly where that link was going to take someone before they clicked it. You made the right call by just deleting that out. I think this is definitely an issue within Wikipedia, and a distinction that's needed, but not sure where to take this from here.[[User:Dflovett|Dflovett]] ([[User talk:Dflovett|talk]]) 18:07, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
:This article is a mess and doesn't really do things the Wikipedia way. But for reasons I explained above, there's never going to be a Wikipedia way to document search engine optimization accurately. There are no industry standards, everyone (even in academia) just makes up terminology for their own purposes, and the people who pioneered some of these techniques (including me) are considered Primary Sources (although there is a suggested way to use them - [[Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary sources|Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary sources - Wikipedia]]). At this point, my goal is just to keep the confusion in the article to a minimum. I don't have time and energy to do much actual editing on Wikipedia these days. [[User:Michael Martinez|Michael Martinez]] ([[User talk:Michael Martinez|talk]]) 19:18, 5 January 2025 (UTC)
== Semi-protected edit request on 16 January 2025 ==
