101 Articles Free For All Links
FFA – FREE FOR ALL LINKS
FFA is the abbreviation for Free for All links which are basically webpages that allows anyone to submit his/her website's URL in their website for absolutely free of cost. The site acts as a home to thousands and thousands of FFA pages.
FFA is a spam technique for attracting more traffic to one's website. Originally the concept was invented as a search engine optimization technique with good intentions in mind. However, over the decades the scenario changed as the FFA links lost its novelty and lots of auto submitters emerged in the internet. The personals who practiced the art of auto submissions posted links of their websites in several FFA sites at once, removing the need for you to visit each page yourself. This drastically reduced the quality of FFA sites and hence the chance of anyone actually clicking on your site.
The business of FFA owners dropped drastically eventually and thus the concept which was started with a free good has lost its way in between.
Thus, as per the situation, a website owner must avoid free for all links sites at any cost if they want to develop their website and business in turn.
Reasons for avoiding FFA pages:
There are several reasons why one webmaster shouldn't use these FFA pages for advertising their websites. Here are few of them.
Primarily FFA pages have lost its value. It has become a useless source of traffic derivation. Only a minority of web users makes use of FFA pages to find websites. Most surfers these days prefer to use search engines or directories. Originally there were many search engines available in the internet. However, ever since technology advanced and use of crawlers, spiders and bots came into the picture, there are only 4 popular search engines which has the ability to cover almost every website in the internet. These popular search engines are Google. Yahoo, MSN and Bing respectively. Moreover, FFA pages are webpages of long lists of unorganized URL's which make it all the more difficult for viewers to search through and find the particular website they are seeking for. The task is virtually impossible and viewer needs to have humongous amounts of patience to find the site he is looking for. It makes the task of searching more difficult and complicated annoying viewers eventually.
Registration is a very important procedure when it comes to FFA pages. You need to register yourself as a member with your e-mail address to post your website's URL free of cost. The owners of the FFA pages then tends to send tremendous loads of spam mails to your e-mail id from then onwards which annoys the registered members and all the more puts them through lot of complications. As an expert I have come across FFA owners selling member's ids to spammers as well. These spammers floods member's inbox with spam mails and thus before you register yourself with FFA pages for your website's benefits, think twice and be ready to receive thousands of spam mails from spammers as well.
Search engines are pretty aware of these FFA pages. As of now, these FFA pages are of no value to them as search engines are more than sufficient enough for finding websites. Moreover, if a website uses these FFA pages for link building concept which plays a significant role when it comes to ranking a website, it is considered as an unethical optimization strategy which manipulates search engines for a better ranking. Eventually if your website is found to be indulging in such unethical optimizing strategies, your website will be banned which is the last thing any website owner would want. The FFA pages also require a reciprocal link from your site before allowing you to paste your website's URL in theirs. Google considers FFA pages to be link farms which play a significant role in unethical manipulation techniques for website's benefits in search engine's result sets. FFA pages are collection of indiscriminate, often unrelated links to other webpages. It is commonly used for artificially boosting link popularity and thus is considered to be spam by major search engines.
Considering the above three points, any website owner at any cost must avoid FFA pages for advertising their websites. Google states that FFA pages are artificial and illegitimate way to increase link popularity. Google follows a very strict policy when it comes to link farm spam issue and considers FFA pages to be a source of link farm spam. They will immediately ban your website from appearing in their search engine index if your website is found to have participated in FFA pages and other link exchange programs.
Conclusion:
Free for all links (FFA) pages are webpages essentially created for improving the search engine placements of particular websites. It is a manipulation technique and one among the search engine optimization strategies that is built upon the roots of link popularity. It is an unethical strategy and thus condemned by all search engines. After several such practices search engine are pretty aware about such practices and have categorized them under link farm spam issue. There are several automated programs available in the market that can place your link in thousands of FFA pages hoping that the resulting incoming links will increase your website's ranking in search engines based on link priority and traffic derivation and developing that particular website's business. This isn't true for certainty. As an expert I can guarantee you 100% that your website is bound to be penalized and banned by search engines if your website is found to be associated with several FFA webpages.
As an SEO expert I can state that many reputable SEO firms like mine do not place much value on FFA's. We rather consider it to be insignificant procedure amongst all search engine optimization strategies which is our biggest priority and purpose. The reasons for such a perspective when it comes to FFA pages are as follows:
- FFA's maintain only a small number of links for a short span of time. This duration is way too short for even to be picked up by search engines.
- The only sole human traffic to FFA pages is almost completely from web owners visiting the FFA page to past their website links manually.
- Search engine algorithms these days take more facts into counts before assigning a rank for a website. More than the link number or link popularity they also check for the relevancy under the context which the unrelated links in FFA pages certainly do not possess.
- The biggest drawback of FFA pages is the amount of spam e-mails a genuine website owner is bound to receive from either spammers or FFA page owners. Primarily because of this reason, most SEO firms consider FFA pages to be a form of spamdexing (*Spamdexing also known as search spam, search engine spam, web spam or search engine poisoning is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves numerous methods such as repeating unrelated phrases to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner which is inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system).
The best conclusion for website owners when it comes to search engine optimization for boosting one's business and link popularity concept is trying to manually submit their website to well known and trusted directories. Link popularity and optimization strategies aren't considered to be a blackhat SEO technique. Just that when it is misunderstood between link farm and link building, it opens up the window for several complications and issues. Always check for the directories Google PageRank before submitting your website to the directories. If you find the PageRank to be between 3 to 9, it means that the directory has sites linking in that pretty much relevant under the context. Obviously higher the PageRank of the directories the better it is for the safety as well as optimization benefits for your website. Being a good businessman you should be able to judge and choose wisely before acting upon. Gather all the background details before making decisions and if all goes well, it will certainly help you to develop a wonderful website which will turn out to be a remarkable marketing strategy for your company which will eventually reap more profits and help to develop your business at the end of the day.
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Screen Shots |
The screen shot talks about FFA link farms marketing and the harm that these link farms may cause to your site.
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Working Example |
The below mentioned screen shot is an example of a FFA site which offers free link submission to users. There are also various schemes available for free link networks. This is a way of creating more spam in the web.
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |