One of the basic tools of improving the “authority” of your website, which usually leads to ranking improvements on the search engines, is the process of link-building. By “link-building” we mean getting other websites to link to your website. This is a quality game more than a quantity game. It doesn’t matter really whether you have a lot of links if the links pointed at your site are from poor-quality websites.
When it comes to poor quality websites, the poster-child is the dreaded “link farm.” A link farm is a site that will post links to any site you bring to it’s attention. Link farms typically have thousands and thousands of links with no rhyme or reason.
One of the ways to tell whether you should consider a site to be a link farm, and therefore whether you should try and get them to link to your site, is by the Google PageRank of the site. If you have the Google toolbar enabled on your browser then you can check this easily enough. If it’s a PageRank of 0, just pass it by.
Here’s a bit of a caveat: Even if the PageRank is high, you should still look at the site critically. If you see more than 100 links on any given page, it won’t do you much good. If you see tons of links for porn sites, or viagra-hawkers, pass it by as well. Use your common sense. If the site looks like just a big mass of links, it’s a link farm, regardless of PageRank.
