A FFA, or free for all page is a very simple thing in both concept and reality. You can submit one line of text to the page and visitors can click on this text to visit your site if you are interested. This would be a great thing if they worked the way that most business owners would prefer that they did. What business owners, yourself included would like is to receive massive amounts of email from interested customers - but instead, what they see a lot of in their inboxes is email form other business owners trying t make a sales pitch. Not so productive, is it? For most, these FFA pages do not give the necessary return on your investment to make it worthwhile.

So why do FFA pages usually fail to get results? Think about it like this - your ad is just one of possibly thousands on this page. What's more, these sites are often visited by other business owners who have placed ads, but rarely by those looking to buy a product or service.

These pages have another defect as well - they are generally designed to scroll. As new links are added, old ones just keep moving farther and farther down the page. At one time when FFA pages enjoyed less popularity than they do today, your ad may have been near the top for a day. Now, your ad may be out of sight within minutes! This means you would need to repost your ad again and again over the course of a day. And there is still the problem that you are not reaching customers on these pages, just other merchants.

Also counting against FFA pages is the fact that most search engines ignore them entirely. A search engine sees a FFA page as a page of unrelated links and passes it by. Remember, relevance is key with search engines - and FFA pages have nothing of the sort.

FFA webmasters are a bit smarter than those who use them to advertise. The FFA page will require an email address to submit your link; meaning the FFA site owner is building their email list every time someone posts an ad. It is the site owners of FFA pages who are truly the beneficiaries of these pages.

So is posting an ad on a FFA page a complete waste of time? That depends. If you are posting an ad there, the answer is likely yes. However, if you are the host of a FFA page, you can reap a lot of benefits - by doing so you can quickly build a list of prospective customers and that is really the only way to make good on the promise of FFA sites.