Maybe it's a dumb question and forgive my ignorance but if I'm submitting a site to a directory how do I know google won't punish my site? Aren't link farms extremely similar? what's the best way to tell the difference between the two? Thanks in advance for your responses people.
I would guess look deeper into the directory. Maybe check these. 1. Has it gained 10,000 links in 2 months. 2. Can you go into the forum category and find blogs listed there with pharmacy all in the one category. 3, Do they list just about anything you through at them. 4. Does it look like a FFA. Check for yourself but that still cant secure anything, most of it will stand and and be obvious, if your visiting a directory and it makes you feel not quite right then should you submit there?
there are limited number of links per page on directories they are in appropriate category and sometimes with unique content on related page.
Many directories are often categorised link farms. They offer little value to end users. I would say it all depends on what a link farm is. I would say a word cloud is a link farm. T here are many free directories and paid directories that only accept quality sites and don't allow spam. They have unique category structures, lots of content and they also add sites themselves. They are not link farms.
Your website in no way would be penalized for being added to a bad directory. At worst the submission would not be counted as a link. Getting penalized for being placed on a bad site would open a large can of worms of people adding competitor’s websites to known bad websites. None of the search engines, especially Google is foolish enough to open up the door to this. Link farms do not edit submissions and have a very generalized topic structure.
Actually Matt Cutts recently admitted that it is possible to damage a competitors rankings through link buying so they have already opened that can of worms. I can't find the source at the moment though :-( As to the question... A link farm is where a group of web sites all link to each other. So lets say there were 5 web sites: Website A Links to B, C, D, E Website B Links to A, C, D, E Website C Links to A, B, D, E Website D Links to A, B, C, E Website E Links to A, B, C, D When they first came about, they wouldn't just link to the homepage of the sites either, real spam farms would link to every page within each site too. Directories do not work like this, you are not forced to link back to them and if you are then you shouldn't be submitting in the first place. And a vast majority of directories don't submit theirs to other directories.
The examples you are showing are cross linking. The term of link farm actually originated in the late 80’s for pages that contained nothing but banners, usually affiliate websites. Back then before the dot com crash banner advertising was very profitable and as an editor we used to see a lot of them.