Originally Posted by Blotch

Everyone who said "backlinks can't hurt you" is completely and totally wrong. Google monitors how many backlinks you get and how quickly you get them. They consider the age of your site and how much traffic it recieves and then use a ratio to determine how many backlinks a site like yours should recieve. Link farms will send you many links in a very small period of time. If Google determines that a site like yours could get around 100 links per month and then you suddenly get 1000 links in a day, they know that you used a black method to achieve those links. If you're serious about improving your PageRank or search engine listings, you would definitally not use any kind of link farm because you WILL get banned.