Search Engine Marketing
"Free For All" Services
You've seen ads for services that offer to submit your website to thousands of search engines for one low price. Are they worth even a few dollars?
Free For All (FFA) pages are basically link pages where you can submit your site for free and your website address will be added to the page. Viewing one of these FFA pages will usually just show a page with website addresses listed - and that's it. There are literally thousands of such pages, but there are a few setbacks which in most cases outweigh any benefits you might get from registering.
First, FFA pages don't bring in any real traffic. That's because nobody visits FFA pages to find another site - they'll use a search engine or other directory instead. Therefore, your submission is just a dead link.
Second, people often submit their site to thousands of FFA sites in the hope that this will increase their "link popularity" and therefore boost their search engine ranking. The truth is that not many of the FFA sites are recognized by the major search engines, so they won't credit your site with all these "links". Research has shown that submitting to FFA pages does NOT significantly increase your "link popularity" or search engine ranking.
Third, as other people around the world submit their sites to the same FFA pages, your site gets pushed down the list until you reach the end and are then taken off the list. Because FFA pages are so easy to submit to, your site can be pushed off the list in a matter of days or even hours! This means you have to constantly resubmit your site to maintain your listing.
Fourth, FFA pages are a good way to get spam email. That's the primary reason why most FFA services have been set up. When you register your site you have to provide your email address and then the owner of the page will usually send emails to you trying to sell you something. Although some FFA pages claim to be "spam free", most aren't, so if you submit your site to thousands of FFA pages in one hit, you can expect hundreds and hundreds of emails within days - and they'll often keep coming unless you unsubscribe to each one. Occasionally you'll get emails that don't even let you unsubscribe.
Our advice? Don't bother with them.
