I'm new to SEO promotion and have heard that link farms can get you banned from search engines. I'm looking to link to a number of sites. What is the difference between a directory and a link farm? Thanks, Randall Blake Mitchell
free web directories are more likely to become link farms because they always have thousands of sites in pending and the owners sometimes approve the listings massive. And this is how all kind of crap websites are listed together with you. As an advice, use the paid directories instead of the free ones as much as you can.
Plenty of free directories are not link farms, lets make it clear to people asking questions that free directories are not teetering on easily becoming link farms, as by suggesting that the paid ones will be fine is doing nothing to convince people that directories are ok. To bolster the reputation of directories as a whole you must stop putting down free directories, makes us paid directory owners look desperate. Randall Blake Mitchell, paid, free directories are fine, you need to look for yourself in each directory and decide if you want to be listed in it, and other directory owners cant be responsible for how an individual directory goes that is owned by someone else. Please dont lump us all together as one thing or the other, theres so much more to directories than being called one thing or the other. C'mon guys, stick up for yourselves, stop using free directories as scape goats and do something to build back up the reputation for all directory owners.
In my experience of submitting to 'free' directories - the directory owner emails you afterwards with a list of his 100 other directories...which are all linked to within each directory OR 'guaranteed' links from directory submissions. Both go hand in hand and should be avoided like the plague
link farm means posting all links on one page to get listed in google where as directory has categories and all links are posted in relative category only i hope this will help a bit
The answer to your question is that they search engines won't penalize you for where your links shows up because then competitors could simply submit your website to spammy places and beat you in the SERP's - the worst that will happen is those links won't count.
Traditionally, a link farm is a page or site that simply has a laundry list of links on a page with little or no other content. Don't know how long you've been around the net, but look at some of the old GeoCities sites - many of them are true link farms; they have pages entitled "Sites I Like" and then have hundreds of links (often unrelated) on the page with nothing more than the linked text. People had sites like this because years ago there wasn't a Google or Yahoo and finding a great site was very difficult so people relied on word of mouth. These early pages helped the web grow to the interconnected web of sites we know today. Directories, took what was good from those early link pages and created something much more useful. Most directories contain a good description of the sites listed, the sites are grouped by topic and hopefully the directory owner is limiting the number of listings per page. Like all types of sites, some directory owners allow their sites to degrade into a waste of bandwidth by allowing the descriptions to be keyword-stuffed nonsense, have keyword-stuffed titles/links, and by accepting any site regardless of quality and whether or not it belongs in the category in which it resides. Personally, I do not see a bad directory as a true link farm - it's simply a bad directory. And as jg mentioned, you will not be penalized for the sites that link to you. Common sense would tell you that you only have control over the links you put on your own site. To penalize or ban a site for the incoming links it has would lead to the search engines having very few results as competitors got each other's sites banned due to bad links. Climbs up on her soapbox... The only way that the bad directories will go away is if we educate folks as to what makes them a waste of time to submit to AND if we directory owners STOP SUBMITTING OUR OWN SITES TO THEM!!! Educating submitters will never happen if we continue this ridiculous free vs paid directory crap and allow people to continually make blanket statements about directories that refer to those same sites that we as a group should be blackballing. OK, I took a breath and am now climbing down from my box.