What is a link farm? And how can they harm your site in SEO? I always heard I should stay away from them.

I wouldn't think they'd be good. But to me it'd just be one site with tons and tons of links to other sites. Could be useful, could not be useful.

You want to stay away from those types of sites as well as free for all link pages. They used to be a good way to build traffic. That has all changed and if you're link is on these types of sites it can actually hurt you.

How can they hurt you?

Google (in particular) and the other search engines are smart enough to see a link farm as a site that is trying to artificially the page rank of sites. Adding your site to a link farm can actually decrease your page ranking.

 

You want to build inbound links from sites with recognized search engine 'authority'. In other words, sites with a lot of heavily indexed content. Preferably, you want to add very deep inbound links to sites that are not only carrying a lot of 'weight', but also sites that are in your own niche.

 

A few years back, a link was a link was a link. And webmasters were spamming the entire Web with their links. Today, the search engines are wise to the trick. That dog ain't gonna hunt no more. ;)

Actually guys, getting your link there isn't going to hurt you and here's why.

 

While you can control who you link to (never link to a link farm) you can't control who links to you. If you'd get penalized for having incoming links from these pages, then everyone would be out building link farms and putting their competitors links all over them.

 

Rather than penalize you for this link, google simple ignores them and doesn't treat them as links.

A link farm is usually one page that consists of 50 to 100 or more links to websites that have nothing in common with the content of your site. Link farms are being penalized by search engines.

Yes they are. As are content scraper sites.