The administrator of another blog asked me to write a paid post about a WordPress blog called Link Exchange. It is a service designed to inform people about reciprical links and how people can cooperate to get more traffic to their websites.
Link Exchange is a very new site as evidenced by the fact that although they are accepting comments, they have not yet edited their "About" section. Presumably, however, that will happen soon.
One of the things they warn about is getting tangled up with so-called link farms, which they describe as sites that do not have a similar focus to yours, but rather offer to link you up to hundreds of unrelated sites. This can hurt your traffic rather than helping it, because it is inorganic.
They explain more about this in the link called add url link exchange which they shared with me.
I'm not sure how I feel about the use of the term organic to describe the integrity of search mechanics, but their point is very well taken that if your web site contains links that the major search engines view as destructive to their integrity, that can drastically reduce your traffic. Personally, I am not terribly concerned about getting traffic for traffic's sake, but I am concerned with integrity. I am not interested in trying to fool the search engines. I am interested in blogging for fun and to promote the exchange of information. I am not wholly against breaking a few rules if the rules are silly, but I am very much against breaking the law or doing anything fraudulent. Therefore, I would avoid link farms not so much out of fear of losing traffic, but rather because they seem rather unscrupulous to me.
I guess, though, that whatever the motive, the result would be the same.

