1.What are link farms? 2.I have read that one shouldnt submit his blogs/sites to link farms to avoid getting banned from google index.Can free directories be link farms? 3.If yes.....how can we spot them? pls reply.....................Seo experts
My dear friend A link farm includes sites that links to other sites for the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity score. Unlike perfectly valid links to sites with related information, sites that participate in link farming contain links to totally unrelated sites. This practice is also referred to as link stuffing. Google hates link farms and labels the links they generate as spam. In fact, Google hates them so much that some sites get removed from the index if they're affiliated with link farms. Spooked, some webmasters are considering removing all outbound links from their sites. Cool mate and Enjoy your day
You're part of a link farm is when your site links to all (or considerable number) of other sites in a link farm. Usually link farms ask you to place a directory page on your site. By having it you automatically becoming a part of link farm (since you'll have all their sites on that page). If you don't want to be a part of it - just remove that page. And yes - most of search engines figured out how to remove large clusters of highly interlinked sites. So it is better not to risk...
Basically don't even go near link farms if you want to have any kind of a chance of ranking high in Google and other search engines, they really, really frown upon it.