Use of ffa pages?

I think unless you do it to tens of thousands of those at once I don't htink they will have any postiive influence on your rankings.

Boy, does that bring back memories...

I thought Free For All pages, where anyone could post a link, were extinct. In the early days (circa 1996-7), FFA pages were a valuable way to spread the word about new sites and content on this WWW thingy.

Then two things happened which pretty much killed them off.

> "Marketers" (and I use that term very loosely here) decided that FFA pages were a great way to build lists they could blast with offers as often as they wanted to. Most of the terms of use included language that said that by using the site, you agree to receive email from the owner. So, while it technically wasn't "spam", it was a flood of annoying emails. One side effect was FFA owners selling their lists on the side so that even if you opted out of the FFA site, you would still get bombed with real spam.

> As with most things, automated software hit the market to make posting to FFA pages quick and painless. These often came bundled with lists of FFA pages scraped from search results. The resulting volume made FFA pages worthless, as your link would scroll off the page in seconds. To make up for it, users would just let the bot run continuously, often overloading the FFA servers.

Once those two things happened, you ended up with spammers spamming each other, nobody actually looking at or clicking links on the FFA page, and FFA owner databases filled with fake emails.

Seemed like someone flipped a switch, and the FFA pages were gone.

My only suggestion would be to keep looking and give up on the idea of FFA pages.