Link Farms and Free-For-Alls - May Actually Serve a Purpose

One Technique Used by Many with Success to Validate some Programs

[aaaaa]

Conducting a Search on Google or Msn for "reciprocal link exchange" or "link farms" or "free for all links pages" "ffa" - etc.

... will return webpages with fairly decent PageRanks that have been existing over a period of time on various search services.

Some people use this a standard of whether - or - not
these techniques have validity.

(Why would they thrive on the Search Engines if they were "spam" or "outlawed")

Additionally, search engines "spider" links...
does this linking technique actually increase the frequency of a listed webpage being spidered - thus, decreasing the odds of updates not being reflected.

Is it possible that WebSites have been "dropped" due to programming idiosyncracies of the various search engines
(for examples Google has various "cached" versions with various updates that appear during the month - perhaps not ALL the databases have ALL the pages or SAME pages listed)

[fathom]

I think the greatest consideration is...

Does your primary markets go looking for you under "reciprocal link exchange" or "link farms" or "free for all links pages" or "ffa"?

As long as the link structure isn't overly "crosslinking" these are simple reciprocal link exchanges and will rank and receive PageRank as any other site, but...

If you are selling "widgets", a general market "link exchange" does not overly help you and people looking for products (widgets) are not going to find you, if your focus is here.