When a Link Farm and when a Directory

How do you tell a link farm from a directory

[SeventiesMartin]

I'm looking around for good directories to get listed on. It occurs to me that some respectable directories that are above board are very similar in format to some known link farms.

Basically, both are lists of sites with a description, so how do you tell one that is ok to get listed on from one that isn't.

What prompts the question is that I am looking at a particular directory (and there are others I'm looking at), with categories, and within the categories are lists of sites with a description. This directory is recommended as a good site to get listed on. But another well know site that has been given the label "link farm" in other forums follows the exact same format.

I would like to be able to name both sites to illustrate the point.

I suppose you could argue that OD and Yahoo directory are links farms, we know they aren't, but just what differentiates them from other sites that are labelled as link farms.

I know the real difference is that a link farm exists purely for the exchange of links, and a directory provides a useful selection of sites. But on the outside the 2 can look very much the same.

I wouldn't want to inadvertantly get my site listed on another site that is treated as a link farm, but at the same time would not want to miss getting listed in a legit directory just because I didn't know what label it carried.

Just how do you tell?

[europeforvisitors]

Here's a pretty good description of link farms (at least the most obvious types, which involve reciprocal linking with machine-generated pages):

[stickysauce.com...]

I found the link above in Google, which also had a link to the following thread in the "Reciprocal Linkage Topics" board here at Webmaster World:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I'm sure you'll find a lot more information on link farms if you search Webmaster World and Google.

[SeventiesMartin]

Thanks europeforvisitors, I think I see the difference.

It's not how they look from the outside, but more the way a site is expected to link to them. And that makes sense from the 2 sites I was looking at. One asks for a load of categorised link pages to be placed on your site with one category relevant, a link farm. The other pukka directory doesn't.

Thanks again.