I tried to get back to post after kgun's reply but my computer kept off line and I couldn't post. Thank you all for your answers, Jim that is interesting your saying that they offer you a link to link to them but then the link they give you back is to something different. If I understood that right. I read one where they give you a link back then after a few months they take your link down. So I can see where there could be scams to the web masters trying to improve their ranking. What I was worried about was if by putting my links to my other sites would be hurting my own rankings. Some of my sites are related to each other and some are not, most of my sites have to do with trees, Bible study or animals, but I have a couple now that include other things, kid stuff, maps, and antiques, plus my friend hosts my sites so I include links to his sites too, so I was worrying about being considered a link farm by linking to my own sites and my friend's sites and he links back to mine. And thanks deepsand, I thought about that after I did the definition search and wrote below what I got out of that. I hope I get this posted this time, storms coming up must be why I've been going off line all day.

I did this search that you sugested and I came up with these definitions.

define: link farm

web page ---- that only accepts incoming links
web pages----that only purpose to increase incoming links to a website
a site --- that only has outgoing links to participating web sites
a site --- consisting of a long list of unrelated links for search engine ranking
a group of interlinked sites--- that manipulate page rank
a website --that has no content of their own featuring links to other sites
a large group of web pages-- that link to a specific page or to each other
a web page -- with no group structure only large amount of links
websites--- that are interlinked together or to every page in the group
a website-- that contains many links


To me the really didn't clearify what they actually were, by the differnt definitions just about anything could be considered a link farm, even the search results pages from a search engine or pages I put up advertising affiliate products.

I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out that in 1999 links back to your site were a major consideration for how popular your site was and that online business web sites had few natural links back to them so link farms were started as a way for them to get links back to thier web sites. In return search engines removed some of them so that they wouldn't influnence search results. Now that the web has grown so large and bots grew in capacities to index more sites, link farms became less important for getting links back only so that you could stay in the results of the search engines.

Directories are now more like a substitute for search engines to find relavent sites that you are searching for, so in a way any kind of a " link farm" would be looked at as a competitor to a search engine. Yet in the Google guide lines they tell you to submit your site to good directories and not to link to " bad neighborhoods" as that will count against you.

My final conclusion then is a link farm really isn't something to worry to much about, because everyone has a different opinion of what they are and because the whole idea of the web is for everyone to be linked together somehow anyway.