I've heard a lot about how bad link farms are how they are not allowed when you have affiliates. I just assumed they were a site that had all links to other sites but soon realized that must not be what they are because directories and search engines and forums have lots of links to other sites.

I put links to my other sites at my sites and never got banned from Google ads and search engines so I figured that is ok. I see a lot of people with reciprocal link pages and link exchanges so I figure those are ok... so what is a link farm that I keep hearing is bad. I want to know what it is so I know not to do that.

I got a warning message from Google once about having one of my sites listed at link referral and they said that was not quality impressions, so I dropped out of link referral and never put any of my sites back up there although I enjoyed going to link referral and didn't see anything wrong with it and I have a affiliate link on there now and noticed other people who had sites up there had Google links. Is that considered a link farm?

Are surf sites considered link farms? Where you surf other peoples sites and for every two you visit they put up your site link for one credit.

I've seen the term "link farm" a lot of times but I've never seen an explanation as to what it means. Can someone explain it to me please?