Do not submit to FFA sites (Spam farms)

[vslevin]

I've been seeing a lot of offers lately in the marketplace forums where you can pay to have your website submitted to FFA sites. Do NOT waste your money.

In case you do not know, FFA stands for free-for-all. People submit their website onto these websites and their link is placed on a website with thousands of other links. These are known to Google and other search engines as link farms. Link farms are bad. See the Wikipedia page for Link farm.

Google can detect link farms, and gives no credit to those incoming links. It is a myth that FFA pages help your link popularity. From the Wikipedia page:

Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filtering those pages from indexing and search results. In some cases, entire domains were removed from the search engine indexes in order to prevent them from influencing search results.

Google recommends that you build relevant links, and that you "don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank."

Search engines such as Google recommend that webmasters request relevant links to their sites (conduct a link campaign), but avoid participating in link farms. According to Google, a site that participates in a link farm may have its search rankings penalized.

In addition to it having absolutely no effect on your search engine optimization efforts, you are actually aiding spammers. FFA sites are actually ran by spammers, for the sole purpose of collecting your email address and bombarding your email address with spam. I was once foolish enough to pay for an FFA link submission program, and after submitting my websites, I was receiving 1000's of spam messages a day, in the same email address I used for orders on my website. To date, I am still receiving messages everyday in that email account. In the ebook that accompanies the "link blaster", it said that you could pay money to run an FFA page, and have all email addresses sent to you to run a marketing campaign. In other words, spammers purchase FFA pages for the sole purpose of spamming you.

People do not go to FFA pages to find websites to go to. The only visitors to FFA pages are other webmasters looking to submit their page, with no interest in the links.

FFA pages will do nothing for you. You will receive no benefit from SEO, you are wasting your money, and aiding spammers. Even if you use a junk email address when you signup, you are still aiding the spammer. They still have an email address to sell to other spammers. So you are just signing up for spam, and getting nothing out of it.

 

[spaggle]

Yep. Aka spam farms. Guaranteed spam in your inbox.

 

[Jo]

Thank you for the post. As much as I've been online I've never really known what those were. Reps added.