I was lately worried about spam sites referencing me in their hidden text. They'd come up for searches for my site. Google has pretty much filtered them for the most part now (yay). And I read that they don't penalize for other sites linking to us. This is 1,000% necessary or else it would be easily to make competitors fail and for SPAM to take over good sites' ranks. But SEs do penalize for links from link farms. This is the right thing to do, most probably. But how can a search engine tell the difference to penalize or not properly? What if a spam site sets up like a link farm - or else you did not yourself submit your own URL to a link farm? Essentially an important part of my question is - if SEs penalize for link farm links, then can't/won't evil competitors tank competition by submitting other sites' URLs?????!!! Perhaps I do not fully understand link farms. Is there some link back requirement, therefore only linking out effects it? And therefore the SEs only still DO count outgoing to penalize? Then essentially faux link farms set up to harm would only tank themselves and be worthless. (Unless the spam-masters are hackers too and add links to competition. Heh.) And then there's the other kind of link farm which I'm not clear on. How can a group of sites linking to each other be told apart from a network of family/related sites? Many weblog networks' sites aren't connected by topic, so I don't see the difference. What can be wrong with linking a family of sites? But is that the kind of link farming that gets penalized? What about the FFA pages then? So confused and curious! This is a really interesting question to me. Thanks for reading.