Hi I know that linking to a link farm can hurt your rankings. But what actually IS a link farm? Is that a site that have nothing but only links to other sites? I have a particular question if linking lets say to site like http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com or similar one with hundreds if not thousands outbound links on the main page can hurt you? Another question is will a link ON the main page of this site benefit my rankings? I know that it wont hurt, but will it help? Thank you
Linking to a link farm will hurt your site. However, getting links from link farms will not affect your rankings.
Ok let me re-phrase my question. Let's say I have a website with decent PR3-4 and I have 1000-2000 links on the main page. 1) Will you place your website link on my site? 2) Will you place a link to my site on yours?
1)I can find know reason to place my link on a site such at that as it will have no SEO bennifit (and I doubt very much that it would bring me any Quality traffic) 2)I can also find Absolutely NO reason to Link TO a site like that
It depends actually on individual sites, Domain trust, Authority, Website Age etc. New sites getting loads of links from link farms may get flagged and banned by google, but Authority sites getting those links will always be safe because they have google trust and authority. Bad neighborhood links are not good to have, but how can you control them as well? Because what, if your competitors spam your link in those sites? so not really in your hand and you cant control the flow of inbound links created for your sites by your competitors either(that's called Negative SEO), and Google knows that as well. Aside that, always stay away from link farms.
Linking out to bad neighborhoods is not a good idea. You need to determine if the site you're linking out to has any value. It may help, but only a little bit if it has 100s of outbound links. On the other hand, if google thinks it's a link farm then it will not help.
I don't quite understand why you need to re-phrase the question as KC gave you the answer. Respected websites will never ever link to sites like those. Secondly, you inlinks cannot hurt your ranking as they are out of your control whereas if you link to spam your website will be treated as spam as well as it's only you who has control. Don't care who links to you but make sure you only link back to good websites.
Thanks for your answers. I get all that, but what I dont get is how webmasters have paid http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com owner a total of $1.000.000 to place their links on the main page KNOWING how many links there are will be? Second, according to Yahoo this website has 36000 incoming links. Are you saying that out of 36000 websites every single webmaster doesnt know that linking to a link farm will hurt you??? Or the simple answer is that http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com IS EXCEPTION of the rule?
Well my two cents is that this particular page is very famous and so becomes, as you say, the exception to the rule. If you can get it to be famous or in high demand, the search engines are not going to just ignore it regardless of it's other issues. When loads of people are searching for it and for information about it, it's obviously got something going for it besides being a link farm. And if it's managing to generate millions of pageviews, who cares what the SEs think about it? Of course people will advertise on it. At one point it was getting millions of hits per day. It still probably gets a load of type-in traffic and remains the subject of some chatter. An interesting study in MMO and marketing in general, as well as capitalizing on the fickleness of the masses. So regardless of the fact that it's otherwise a sort of link farm or billboard, it's inbound links are probably still composed largely of relevant inbound links rather than link exchanges or paid placements. It still generates a fair amount of search and nostalgia traffic, I would guess, along with the contextual references. So it's not just that the SEs have made it an exception, it's that it's more than a link farm. It's a celebrity of sorts.
here's more information on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage. The list were sold there and as it received a lot of coverage so that's where their links come from.
get a couple of good .gov .edu back-links and everything counts afterwards... that website had good pr but no trust if you have enough trust then the link juice will flow as simple as that.... so build google trust and you can basically link from anywhere...
I totally agree. If you aim to build up a useful site, then keep yourself away from link farms, which refer to sites which have more than 100 outgoing links and have no sense-making content.