Because link popularity is so much important for improving search engine positioning, many unethical linking strategies were developed over time. Getting thousands or tens of thousands of links in the shortest time possible by using bad practices had become the goal of many unscrupulous webmasters…

One of the techniques imagined in order to accomplish that goal was the creation of the “free for all pages” and the automated link exchange services.

A free-for-all (FFA) page is a place where anyone can add a link to his/her website. Being an automated process, there is no control over it. Thousands and thousands of unrelated websites are listed on the FFA pages, the only purpose being the link popularity increase.

The reaction of the search engines was fast: they stopped indexing webpages with thousands of links and no real content. Worse than that, websites that linked to FFA pages were severely penalized or even banned from search listings. Website are not penalized for being listed on FFA pages (it is beyond of a webmaster’s control NOT to be listed) but linking to FFA pages can dramatically decrease a website’s ranking.

Automated link exchange services are places where anyone can add his website’s info, and an automatically generated “FFA page” will include the listing. Webmasters participating in this kind of scheme agree to upload those FFA pages on their websites, and link to them from a “legitimate” webpage. By doing so, all the website’s involved become hosts for FFA pages, which is severely penalized by search engines.

One of the most popular services of this kind is linkstoyou.com, which is not even listed in Google (try a search!), despite the tens of thousands of links to their websites from the automatically generated FFA pages… More than that, Google hunts the websites involved in this kind of unethical schemes, and the penalty might be as severe as banning from the search listing.

Search engines constantly improve their algorithms, and fighting unethical artificial ranking inflation is one of their main goals. Manipulation of link popularity by “smarter” unethical methods might work in the short time, but in the long run it is a sure loss, and might get your website banned from the search listings!

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