Link Directories & Link Farms – Are They The Same ?

I have been wondering about this for some time – are a Link Directory & Link farm the same & if not how do they differ as I see many Link Directories on the Internet.
Some of them have quite good page ranks & Alexa ratings.
I also wondered if the search engines put any value on them & if submitting a website to them really hels boost you up - traffic wise.
.....Thanks

 

A link farm is a collection of links with no set categories under which the links are placed. Anyone and everyone can submit their links and there is little or no editorial review of these links. In essence, these links have been built for the sole purpose of manipulating the search engines and not designed for the end user. One can identify a link farm from its link pages, where there are hundreds of links on one page and all of them linking to out sites of various topics. There is basically no meaningful purpose or intention behind the links on the page. (Link farms can be easily captured and penalized by search engines because of their pattern of linking back to each other)

A web directory, on the other hand, is not only a collection of links but the links have been categorized under relevant topics and sites are listed only after they undergo editorial review. Directories are useful to the user in that if a user wanted to find a site under a particular topic, it would be easy to go to the appropriate category and choose from the selection of links. All links in a web directory are well-categorized and meaningfully sorted out. Not every link that is submitted to a directory will necessarily be listed as there is always some kind of supervision over the links allowed in a directory.

It's depends on the directory you choose.

 

it's identical between Link Directory and Link Farm Directory.
Link Directory : take a time to get approve ( depend with editorial term)
Link farm Directory : usually they Instant Approval , that might hurt your SERP.

 

The terminology used for directories changed greatly when amateurs who knew nothing about directories and had no editing skills became involved by putting up quick cut and paste directories. The word link became used instead of website and website submission. When you have no knowledge of directories and editing submissions everything is a link.

 

At this time Google thinks all are the same..
We as directory owners do not believe that.

 

nice explanation

 

I think it is rather a large number of rather inexperienced web designers that play SEO's on the Interwebs that believe this to be true. I've yet to see a link farm that was organized, categorized and updated regularly to remove bad our outdated links.