Am I in danger of penalisation for

running a link farm?

[MikeBigg]

I run a hosted visitor counter service. One of the pages is a list of web sites currently using the service (I filter out sites that I consider to be unsuitable).

There are currently about 70 sites on the site list page.

As the sites are fairly random from humour to blogs to foriegn exchange trading, do I run the risk of being penalised for having too many links on a page?

I am going to have to break the page up as the numbers of sites using the service grows, but what would be the best way to do it and maintain/obtain good standing with google and other SEs?

Also, my PR dropped last week from a 5 to a 4? Is this likely to be because of the number of links I haev on that site list page?

Thanks for your insights,

Mike

[martinibuster]

...do I run the risk of being penalised for having too many links on a page?

No. There is NO penalization for having too many links one one page. In the Google webmaster faqs it is advised that you limit links to 100 per page- but this is more to do with intentional limits of their spider.

I am going to have to break the page up as the numbers of sites using the service grows, but what would be the best way...?

You can break it up into themes: Service, humor, travel, etc. This is a great way to attract people to your service because you are giving them the bonus of a themed link from your directory of clients.

Let's clear this up
You do not have a Link Farm. You have a directory of clients. You're clients (I'm assuming) are not linking up with each other and with you. You are listing your clients. There is nothing wrong with this. At absolute worst, it may pass deprecated PR, but it's still passing PR.

Also, my PR dropped last week from a 5 to a 4? Is this likely to be because of the number of links I haev on that site list page?

Bouncing up and down is normal, regardless of how many links you have on your site. The culprit is often Link Rot, the natural decay of the value of your backlinks, as your link partners add more links to the pages you are listed on; and so forth backwards through the link change in a butterfly effect that can have it's roots on the other side of the world.

[MikeBigg]

Thanks for your reply, martinibuster, much appreciated.

I do encourage my clients to link back to my site, but they (probably) won't be linking to each other. I guess this is what distinguishes the list of sites that I have with a link farm?

Regards,

Mike

[plasma]

Am I in danger

yes

of penalisation

no
because there is no such thing like a penalty

for running a link farm?

yes
because there is an algo that has to decide what's spam and what's ham

SCNR

P.S.: Welcome to WW

[nuevojefe]

Not in danger of a severe penalty. Your reciprocal links may in time be deprecated though.

Definitely theme the links by category. This just creates a nicer layout, is more user friendly, and will give people further incentive to get their site linked there.