Why Free-For-All Links Pages Deserve to Fall to Oblivion

The concept behind free-for-all links (FFAL) pages looks good at first sight: you open a webpage where anyone can post links to their sites; visitors keep on coming back because they don't want to miss this free promotion opportunity; as a result, you generate repeat traffic and build a loyal community around your own site.

It's great, right?

Wrong.

There are several flaws in the free-for-all links concept

Free-for-all links pages don't help your site in any way. Because it's so easy to add links to them, spammers are their typical audience. They fill the pages with trashy links. You can delete them, but spammers will use robots to drop their valueless links again. This will force you to spend your precious time monitoring your FFAL page and erasing URLs on a regular basis.

Even if you manage to keep the spamming issues under control, chances are the visitors who use your free-for-all links page will ignore the rest of your site. They will bookmark only that page, post their desired URLs and leave right away, without browsing other sections. Consequently, there won't be any community building benefits for you.

Free-for-all links pages will get you into trouble with search engines

There is yet one more problem about FFAL pages: due to their obvious potential to attract irrelevant, spammy links, they are detested by search engines. They are flagged as link farms. They don't provide any value to Internet users who look for online resources. No wonder people never use free-for-all links pages to search for good sites. In fact, no one--except for spammers--uses FFAL pages for anything these days.

Do yourself and your site a favour: stay away from this type of online tool.

Is there any way to put free-for-all links pages to good use?

It depends on what you see as "good use." If you search carefully, you will find articles recommending that you set up FFAL pages just to gather the email addresses of the URL posters. The reasoning behind this trick is that you should let them spam your page, as long as you can spam them back.

Although many people like the idea of taking revenge on spammers, this is a major waste of time. What would you achieve by spamming them? Do you want to be one of them? Do you expect them to buy anything from you?

Forget this bad idea. There are much better ways to succeed online. And these don't include using free-for-all links pages for suspicious activities.