At What Point Do You Need a Blog Farm?

I was wondering when it makes sense to setup a blog farm to launder link juice.

I've got a few sites up and running and with a moderate level of SEO work and some time (2-3 mos) they are all doing rather well. In fact, three out of five of my niche sites are sitting in either the #1 - #3 positions.

Reading on setting up blog farms (not full autoblogs but unique content sites all promoting one money site) seems like a lot of work. In fact, it's like doubling or tripling the work invested into the main site.

Anyway...at what point does it make sense to invest time/money into a blog farm? Is there some definate point at which the competition ends up being so fierce that you have to take your game to the next level?

You get a blog farm whan you need to launder link juice, just like you said. I am at the point where I know that the tidal wave of direct spam links i've thrown at my sites has banished many of them to the google sandbox, maybe forever.

Blog farms serve as a level of protection against this sort of event. You can channel massive amounts of spam link juice into a farm site, then send it on to your money site using links that are in-context/main text and highly valued by google (they can value links on where they are placed on a page).

In essence, a blog farm of this type - as distinct from a linkwheel - is just a lot of sites, with one site in the middle, which is the most important, being protected by all the others. It supposedly doesn't matter if one of the shield sites gets stuffed in the sandbox for growing too fast or in the wrong way.

The lesser, "slave" sites can be monetized themselves if they take off and start getting traffic. There are complicated link architectures that can be used to further deceive google into thinking that your links between your sites are natural - for example, the hamiltonian path method.

However, with these blog farms there is a catch. I don't know the maths exactly, but I feel pretty damn sure that if I have link juice to the value of 1 going into a farm site, and it has only 1 link total, pointing to the main site, the main site will end up with much less than that value of link juice.

So essentially, in a blog farm, you are diluting your link juice in order to protect your money site from a google spam penalty.