link farms, from what I can tell are automated systems that place a directory of sorts on your site. This same directory is also placed on many other sites. A link page should be custom to your site and have hand picked links on it.
That's the first comparison I've seen which makes the distinction clear. I have seen sites with the same sidebars, features, etc., the same "articles" on the sidebar, and same links on a directory or links field. Link farm. I am curious how these are generated. Unlike many directories, which solicit an "add your url," these appear to scrape links from somewhere else. Is there such a thing as the "home" farm which is used to generate all the rest, in cookie-cutter fashion; is this how it works?
I am sure this has been mentioned somewhere else in one of the threads but in a recent Business 2.0 article it mentioned the use of aggregators to provide content for people who buy domains but dont have any content to provide. It is a great article if you havent read it yet.
Not allways the case. take www . gotlinks . com, they have you add a page to your site that emulates a directory. The difference is ever idiot that installs it gets the same content.
In link farms, usually all the member sites link to all the other sites in the 'farm'. This way, you can easily get a lot of backlinks in a week or two... But this pattern can easily be identified by google, and sites participating in link farms are either penalized or banned altogether. So if you see something like, get 1000 backlinks in less han 15 days, STAY AWAY Ayush
I came across a site the other day that by the definition in this thread, would be considered a link farm. Every person in the ring, puts up a couple of pages and all the pages have the same links. However, they sell premium links by which for a fee, they will put your link on all the other website link pages. However, you are not required to put any kind of link page on your site. Would there be any value in this, or would the value be lost since you are getting links from bad neighbourhoods (ie link farms)?