The Whole Ed Catalog

Find Free for All Links

Free For All Links (FFA) are pages that display your link in exchange for a link back. (See Reciprocal Links) The idea is that this will increase the link popularity of your site, which will improve its search engine ranking. In general, this doesn't really work. (See why).

Buried deep within Google are their Webmaster Guidelines. The guidelines advise:

• "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or 'bad neighborhoods' on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."
• "Avoid 'doorway' pages created just for search engines, or other 'cookie cutter' approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content."

New websites, therefore are faced with a dilemma: They need external links to improve their search rankings, but they need better search rankings to get external links. The following short list of (hopefully) "non-spam" link providers may help: