Hi guys,

I've been doing some SEO for a Photocopier company. Obviously targetting copiers, photocopiers, canon, etc. I've noticed one site that comes up quite a lot. The site that appears when you search on Google.com for "canon photocopier" has an "Affiliates" page (Its the small yellow link at the bottom right, then click on "Enter Affiliate Site".

Now, this appears to be a FFA link page to me. They have a form on their site and basically say they'll link to anyone as long as it's not an adult or political site. I thought Google would punish this affiliate page, it looks like an old skool gateway style page, just lines and lines of links and keywords.

Personally i wouldn't want to be associated with a page like that, it's full of ads for Credit Cards, Viagra and Cheap US Hotels.

What do you think?

Cheers

Will

Google's even more disapproving of FFA pages than affiliates. Affiliates can at least have some useful content (such as reviews). Don't take part in any mass link system, especially one you wouldn't want to be associated with, it's likely to be a "bad neighbourhood" in Google's calculations and utterly useless to you (or worse).

Such a scheme hardly counts as affiliates either. Affiliate links don't (yet) pass on PageRank but both Google and Yahoo are getting quite plucky about redirecting backlinks and I have now seen some honest to goodness third party affiliate links counted as backlinks in Google.

appears to be a FFA link page to me.

As long as you don't link back to them, then you're fine and there won't be a problem.

There are a lot of sites popping up all over the place that simply scrape the search results and create web pages. If you're ranking well for any search term then your site will probably end up on one of those spammy pages.

As long as you don't participate in a link scheme or support any of these spam pages by linking back to them, then you'll never have a problem.