Link farming is usually a page with a huge list of links, 100's if not 1000's and they go around trading links with others, putting the other persons links on these 'farmed' pages. It's NOT good for SEO because 99% of these are considered 'bad neighborhoods' and linking to one of these farms can hurt your reputation as well as your SERPs
Some pages only contain links and nothing else - whenever a particular keyword is typed, sometimes these pages show on the search results. Could these be the ones that you are referring to?
Link farms are pages or websites that are built entirely of links. They are bad for search engine rankings because search engines nowadays are smart enough to detect link farms and consider them to be a black hat SEO trick.
Link farming is an inethical SEO practice that includes creation of a group of highly interlinked sites aimed at inflating link popularity.
Link Farm is a group of web pages that all link to each and every other page in the group and also designed to ascend the rankings of all the sites in any SERPs.
@v2interactive ... You described a Link Exchange. A Linkexchange is a single site with links on it that link out to many sites, and those sites usually reciprocate by linking back to the central linkexchange site. A Linkfarm is a group of sites built that provide one way links back to a central or several central sites. The links are not reciprocated, so the idea is that the you grow the "farm" of sites in order to build many, MANY links back to the sites that you are trying to promote in the SERPS or drive traffic to. This strategy works well but may not work for long.
There is no limit unless you make one for yourself. The Linkfarm software I have has a default database of 2566 WPMU and 5671 Pligg hosts, it allows me to control all of the hosts I put blogs or comments on from one control panel, and it allows me to control wordpress and blogger/blogspot blogs, too. It's best to build backlinks gradually, but that does not mean it has to be done slowly.
steer clear. Its not where your links come from that can harm you, it's more where you link to and if you join a lnk exchange or farm then you will get crucified
Not necessarily. If this were 100% true, then I would be offering my services to crucify your competition (via google bowling). Link exchanges are great for adult sites. Linkfarms are great tools for boosting linkwheels and secondary sites. A smart linkfarm to a money site is not alwaysa bad thing. I think I'm going to have to build one and post it publicly for everyone to see.