Does Google Consider My Site a Link Farm?

Thanks for your note and I'm glad that you're finding value in Growing Your Business with Google. Now, on to your questions...

First off, let me reiterate that a link farm is commonly believed to be a site where its only purpose for existence is to have an ever-increasing database of links, typically without any underlying rhyme or reason. For example, if I had a link on this page that led you to my "best of the Web" area where anyone could submit and have added a link to any site, regardless of category, Google and other search engines tend to frown upon that.

The reason's simple: if inbound links are considered a vote of confidence or an indication that a highly-linked site is somehow better than one with less links, the assumption is that each link is added by someone maintaining a site - or writing a blog entry - that found the content worthy of recommendation. underlying all the fancy algorithms and secret formula, that's the core idea behind Google.

So you can see how having a site that exists purely to have two-directional links (because that's the other half of a link farm: a requirement that every site you point to also points to you, making these huge, artificial webs) really does nothing to indicate what sites are better or worse than other sites.

Having said all that, a PageRank of 7 is quite good, so clearly the inbound links pointing to your site are good ones. In terms of the result of link: searches on Google, don't believe those numbers. Many people believe that those results are more or less random because Google doesn't want people to try and reverse engineer their PageRank formula, so while it reports 70, you might well have hundreds of links.

I've also heard reports of people with a PR6, for example, where a "link:" search only indicates a dozen or less inbound links!

If you have PageRank and can be found in the search engine at all, then you're in reasonably good shape. You should check your log files to see how often GoogleBot is visiting your site, and a search for site:your base domain name will give you a rough sense of how many pages Google has in its index too. For example, site:askdavetaylor.com reports 583 pages (and link:www.askdavetaylor.com reports over 1100 inbound links, btw).

I hope this helps clear up some of your questions!