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What's the difference between a link program and a link scheme? Is one more legitimate than the other and what's the difference?
My understanding:
Link scheme - Also called a link farm set up by co-ordinated web marketeers consisting of hundreds and in most cases thousands of sites all linking to one another for the purpose of boosting link popularity.
Most of these schemes were abused and became spam machines which the engines penalized
Link Program - An application written by web programmers which automates the reciprocal links process, including combing the web for similar quality related sites, emailing the site owner requesting a reciprocal link and sending a spider regularly to the various web sites to ensure that the link still remains.
Anyone else, feel free to jump in here and help me out ;)
Regarding your initial question, I tried to point out that a link program was the application or mechanism used to gather links and reciprocate with other sites whilst a link scheme referred to a group of sites collaborating and building link directories (web rings, link farms would fall into this cat).
I hope that this classification is clear.
Regarding the difference between what we do and a link scheme / farm, its a matter of degrees I believe!
Unfortunately, I am in a rush and will read my post later to see if it makes anymore sense and clarify where I can!