Conclusion: Never ever link to a site you know nothing about. I have been doing a lot of homework on how to best take advantage of one-way links and reciprocal links to best optimize your web site. In plain English, there are two very important take-aways:1. Never link to a site unless you have done your homework on it. The best tool to know whether or not you are linking to a link farm is to use the Google Toolbar. You can download it here… Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar will tell you how a page ranks.  If the page does not rank then you know Google has it on the banned list.  Don’t worry if one of these sites links to you.  Google knows that you can not control what a link farm does.  But, if you link to the link-farm, you will go down in ranking and you could even possibly be banned.2. Never pay for links.  Google has become savvy to this practice and they have penalized many big companies for doing so.  The SearchEngineJournal has a great ongoing discussion about this and page ranking in general.The best advice for building your web site and blog is to provide great content so that people search you out and link to you.  Definitely be savvy and on the lookout for good link-back partnerships but be smart about it.