Hi, I would like to ask you guys one question: Everybody says that backlinks from FFA pages or such are worthless as far as PR is concerned. But if I have, say, 300 incoming links from FFA pages with my best keyword in the anchor text, wouldn't that greatly boost my link popularity for that specific keyword, even if my PR stays the same? Thank you very much in advance for your insight and help.

Ahhhh No it would not. FFA (Free for all) links are spammy and FFA links will do no good for your site. People will think you spam including me and you may never know what Google may think of it too.

FFA = NON-RELATED LINK EXCHANGE & TRYING TO CHEAT BY GAINING UNRELATED LINKS FOR RANKING PURPOSES.

For me I only go for related indexed Google sites such as this forum, other sites related to the web design/logo/hosting/webmaster/seo industry.

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FFA would be great if you could get links and not give them, the problem is when you have to link back to someone irrelevant (Thus the FFA) and when you link to many irrelevant sites you can be penalized thus all links are worthless.

Also do you really think you get credit for links from a casino if you a pet shop? There is no cemantic relationship I guarantee that link is worth nothing

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That was my whole point of my post - Don't think Google nor does any major search engine give credit for unrelated links thus not going to work for you thus worth nothing like SEO Guy said.

I see trying to get unrelated links as trying to cheat the system for ranking power. Not sure if SEO Guy 100% agree's with me but one thing is for sure unrelated links DON'T WORK.

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Hydroderm

Alcohol Myspace Layouts

well I do and I dont wyrickj, I think unrelated (Non reciprocated) links do help increase your sites overall authority and thus chance to rank, however they are nowhere near as valuable as topic specific, however I think completely unrelated recips are almost discounted completely

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Our testing would tend to show that the value of links is:

1. Non-recip from authority
2. Recip from authority
3. Non-recip from theme page on theme site.
4. Non-recip from theme page on irrelevant site.
5. Recip from theme page on theme site.
6. Non-recip from theme page on irrelevant site
7. Non-recip from irrelevant page
8. Recip from irrelevant page appear to have no value.

Having said that, we will happily still exchange with irrelevant pages on irrelevant sites, coz with an average of 5 algo changes per month, who can say what was of value a week ago, and what will be of value in a week's time?
Pictures of Houses : Andalucian horses for sale

I noticed about 3 months ago that the #2 site on MSN for Lexapro (competitive word) had less than a dozen guestbook spam backlinks and that was it.

it will not always be that easy, but irrelevant inbound links are still effective at manipulating search results.

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Thank you very much you all for your advice. I think I will avoid submitting my site to FFA pages then. Thanks again.

Jaime Bonet, Freelance English to Spanish translator
http://www.jb-translator.com

It just doesn't make sense to me that an irrelevant link is worthless in the search engies rankings. I for example, am in a niche industry. I get some links from some of my clients, who of course are not in the same industry as me, therefore the link is totally irrelevant. How can google/yahoo only attribute value to a link from a site in the same industry as you? I make a point not to link exchange with competitiors.


Also, it's difficult for me to get my few relevant links to include the right anchor text. They will almost never put anything but "www.url.com"

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A large amount of unrelated links can force the situation, why do you think blog spammers do what they do. It may not be a great long term goal for a site but if you have a collection of throw away domains they can rank well in Google for a short amount of time and from what I have seen they hold ranking in Yahoo for a while longer.

I only ever recommend links from relevant sites for a client but have used non relevant links for sites of mine in the past and they have helped for good rankings.

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