i am not a link farm

how do i keep it that way!

[soapystar]

HI!
Pleased to say my reciprocal links are growing. the problem is they number some 500. What i do not want is to be penalised as a link farm. What would be your way of going about this? Number one priority for me is that i only have on-topic links. I had some 250 to a page but now i read somewhere that more than 30 can see you labelled as a link farm! is this right?

[Woz]

Organise it into themed a directory perhaps. Also increse the text to link ratio with handwritten descriptions/critiques.

Onya
Woz

[soapystar]

ok..i should have said..yes..i have made a genuine attempt at a directory style...links are grouped by country and continent...and with descriptions and an easy to use navigation...what worried me was that there was mention of an arbitary 30 links figure.....can you see me falling into an mirky water proceeding as i am...while obviuosly google is not gonna penalise directories..i could see google looking at how many of your linked sites are linking back...and then deciding youre a link farm....

[glengara]

You could also increase the amount of non-recip links.
I keep recips relatively low in relation to 'ordinary' outgoing links.

[shelleycat]

Where did the arbitrary number come from? 30 outgoing links sounds way too low to cause problems. I just had a look at my main page and it has more than 30 outgoing links on it now (nearly all of which are reciprical), and I cut back a fair bit recently.

I can understand that this is something to be concered about but I would expect you to need a much much larger number of links and very little other content before you start running into trouble.

[soapystar]

it was nothing official...was looking at the links page for another site..they were refusing to link to sites with more than 30 links saying it can lead to a link farm penalty... .considering i have 500..i was worried....i have 400+ pages of good content..and if there was penalty im sure it would just be my links pages...but id rather avoid trouble if i can....

[Marcia]

There are loads of links pages out there with a lot more than 30 that seem to be doing OK. So far, anyway. It could be that they don't consider the PR of enough value to them with a link from a page with more than 30.

[soapystar]

yep..i realise 30 was a very low figure to cite..and it seems google will just devalue the links if theres too many..it just got me thinking though...given that eventually everyone will be linking to everyone!

[allanp73]

It think you don't have to worry about being considered a link farm. Link farms are a group of sites all using the same page of links.
Just having a large reciprocal links page does not imply that it is links farm.

[soapystar]

phew!