FFA pages

FFA pages, also known as Free For All pages, are pages that allow anyone to submit a link to them, free of cost and without having to link back to the page. Whether an FFA submission pays off or not has long been the cause of a fierce debate. Some claim that FFA pages do not produce enough traffic compared to the time spent on submitting to them and that it is better to invest your resources on search engine optimization or other promotion methods instead. Others point out that a free link is always better than nothing and that a good autosubmitter can get you pretty good results in a minimal amount of time.

In order to find out who was correct and who wasn't, I decided to run a little experiment myself. I rounded up five different FFA submission methods and put them to the test. The following tools were included:

• The Jimtools FFA submission tools
• Marcap's FFA Blaster software
• The FFA Net autosubmitter
• Worldsubmitter's FFA page submitter (now replaced with a set of links)
• Hand submission to 15 random FFA pages found at the Google search engine

Unfortunately, even before I could really begin the test, I noticed that the FFA Blaster software refused to work on my Win98 computer and kept crashing, so I removed it from the test. The others went through the full program, which means that I submitted three times to each of them, keeping three day intervals between the submissions.

All of the visitors from the different sources were sent to a simple page, which only contained the line "Please wait, transferring you to the site. If you aren't automatically transferred in a few seconds, click here.". The page contained a simple JavaScript redirect, which automatically took the visitors to the index page of my site.

I used the same information for all submissions in order to make sure that the differences between the efficiency of the tools wouldn't be caused by the wording of my description or the attractiveness of my title.

Title used: A Promotion Guide - Learn to promote your site!
Description used: Offers free website promotion advice in the form of articles and tutorials. Topics include search engines, directories and reciprocal links. (A shorter version was used, if the page required a shorter description).
Section used: Computers (if available).

After the final submission, I waited for a week and then gathered the results.

What were they like? I saw immediately that my submissions had caused a real flood... but not one of traffic. The E-mail address I had created for the purpose of conducting this experiment got buried in confirmation E-mails and other spam mail. Three weeks after the last submission I calculated that 4500 E-mail messages, mostly confirmation mailings and other spam, had been sent there.

The worst part is, such spamming will not stop after you've received one mail from every page you submitted to. Some people seem to think that if you post once to their FFA page, you're requesting to be bugged from here to eternity with their advertisements. Fortunately I used a Hotmail account that I could just throw away after I was done.

Had I used my real account, I would have had great difficulty in trying to separate the messages I want to read from the massive flood of spam. So, take my word for it - never, ever use your real E-mail address if you decide to post to FFA pages. Get a throwaway account and use it, you'll save yourself a whole lot of trouble.

So, I got spammed. But did I get any traffic from my submissions? Here are the results:

Method used	Visitors	-- "" -- that went past the redirect page	E-mail harvesters
Jimtools FFA submission	5	1	1
FFA Net autosubmitter	26	3	12
Worldsubmitter's FFA	1	0	1
Hand submission	1	0	1
Total	33	4	15

Like poker players often say, "read 'em and weep". The number of visitors was low and compared to the time spent, it was appalling. But that wasn't the biggest problem. The most depressing thing was the quality of the visitors. For every two humans that visited my site, one E-mail harvester came to my pages looking for E-mail addresses to flood with spam.

Even more annoying was the fact that only four of the 33 visitors went past the redirect page I sent them to and of those four people, only a single person bothered to explore the site further. Of course, this was partly my fault, I should have directed the visitors to copies of my index.html page instead of using redirects. That way a few more people might have actually read some of my articles, but it wouldn't have corrected the fundamental problem.

This little experiment proved that the traffic you get from FFA's is low-value traffic. The difference between visitors from other sources is clear when I look at my logs. People that come via search engines or directories tend to stick around for a long time. Visitors from FFA's disappear very quickly without looking at many pages.

What are my conclusions? FFA pages are a waste of your time and your effort. Use your energy for something more productive - you'll find plenty of information about methods that actually work on this site. But if you for some reason or another decide to submit to FFA's, do not use your E-mail address and make sure that the page you submit doesn't contain any E-mail addresses either. One of the E-mail harvesters that visited my site was even clever enough to grab my index.html page after it noticed that the redirect page I sent it to didn't contain any E-mail addresses.

Could FFA pages, in any circumstances, produce significant traffic? The answer is yes, it might be possible. Using FFA autosubmitters doesn't work because your link rolls off from the pages too fast as other people submit their sites via the same tool. Submitting manually to FFA's doesn't work either, because it takes too much time per submission. But it just might be possible to have some success, if you could use the power of auto-submission without having your link roll of the page five minutes after you submitted it. This would require a tool that searches individual FFA pages from the Internet and submits automatically to them, making sure that you won't be submitting to the same list of pages everyone else is using. I haven't tested such software yet, but if I do so in the future, you'll be the first one to know.

As you can see, I believe that in most cases it is useless to submit to these pages. However, there are two sides to each story. In this case, there's the person who submits and the person who runs the FFA page. For the other side of this story, read my article about running a FFA links page on this site.