is it possible, being sabatoged by link farms?

using link farms to ruin PR

[vacorama]

i'm starting to get a little worried, i have this link farm out of nowhere with over 2000 links pointing to my site. Google seems to be indexing all their pages... At the same time my PR has dropped from a 4 to a 3.. Normally i wouldn't be to concerned about the drop, but i also just recently bought a listing in the yahoo directory.. so what are the odds my site would drop from 4 to 3 with a new link from yahoo? i think this link farm must be affecting my rankings.. does anyone know if this is possible? or a way to find out which one of my competitors is behind it?

[caveman]

vacorama, TBPR, as you may know, bounces around a lot ... not to mention the fact that TBPR seems only a vague indicator of a page's importance anymore, which is relative to specific searches anyway.

The current wisdom is that it's very hard for a competitor to hurt you by buying links on a link farm; most likely the link farm links are just gonna be ignored by the SE's.

As for the Y link:

How long ago did you get it? (Takes a while for these things to carry any weight, sometimes months.)

Does the Y page linking to you have TBPR? How much? How many links out from that page? Etc.

Keep in mind that just because the link is from Y, that doesn't mean the link is all that important. If one link from Y changed my PR, I'd worry. ;-)

One caveat: It is possible that if you don't have a lot of other links in, the link farm links plus the Y link may make it appear as though you're on a link buying rampage, but I raise that only because it occurs to me, not because I believe it's likely. And in any event, the cure is - as always - to go out and get more quality IBL's.