Hi all,
1) How to understand bad neighborhoods in Link Exchange?
2) What is a FFA networks? is it good to get link in FFA.

bad neighborhoods? do you mean link from the website does not related content?

FFA? i never heard before... can u pls give the real word?

not sure what you mean by bad neighborhood... The below should be watch out on a link exchange.

1. Linkback page is linked within their site and not orphaned page... robots cannot locate orphaned page.
2. make sure robots.txt does not exclude the link pages or sub directory
3. make sure header does not contain "robots=noindex,nofollow"
4. male sure href link does not contain "rel=nofollow"
5. preferable not linked from a framed page
6. 3 or more way exchange need to take extra caution


FFA or Free For All network are no use at all.. not recommended due to my previous bad experience. Once you submit your site, get ready to receive tons of junk mail... and does not bring result also...

more info on FFA visit -->>> Free For All link page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sites which are not related to your niche and are involved in link-farms, some spamming activity or are banned by Google can be considered as bad neighbor be aware of such sites and you should not exchange links with such saites.

It is great to get links from related theme but you don't have to ignore those unrelated ones.

One of my websites has a high rank (among top 50) for a very highly competitive keyword of "debt free" (one of the highest paying Adsense ads). When asked for one-way links, webmasters wanted between $50 to $200 per year. Since my pocket was not deep, I exchanged digital products available at Digital Products Center with about 200 one-way links from non-related websites.

Since its has a high (PR2) rank now, it is easier now to get one-way links from those who had snubbed me earlier.

If anybody want to give me one-way links in exchange for digital products. Go to Digital Products Center to make your selection and PM your URL with your selection.

If you google "digital products" you would see Digital Products Center among the top 40. Not bad for a PR2 site of less than 6 months old to be listed among some of the top websites marketing digital products.

beware those irresponsible people which exchange link with you and after few month they take of their blogroll or your link in their website.

so no link back to your after that, any your are linking them.

yeah, there are few webmasters who play games with their link partners
better if possible keep watch on all your linkpartners on regular basic.
You can have a look at your traffic stats if you are getting hits from those link partners.

ya... it need to be monitored every now and then... some even worse they put nofollow on the href code or exclude it in the robots.txt....

Yes, there are many webmasters out there who remove links in an effort to get unidirectional links, but maybe it's not too bad if they do that. At least, it's not such a bad thing as far as Yahoo is concerned, provided you link to sites that are related to your site.

According to Yahoo:

"Link to as many relevant pages as possible. Don't be an island, but at the same time don't link to sites that are not connected to you in any way; this can hurt search engine results. If you link to spam, your ranking could be severely hurt".

FFA is considered bad neighbourhood. We should not link to them.

Yahoo is of the opinion that if you link to informative sites that are relevant to your site content, then you are adding value, and you get points for that.

IMO Google hate sites using NoFollow tag for external links, if they found any site using this they can affect your ranking
Nofollow should be used with great care.

Not true. Here's a Q&A from Google's site:

Q: If I nofollow a substantial number of my internal links to reduce duplicate content issues, will this raise a red flag with the search engines?

A: The number of nofollow links on a site won't raise any red flags, but that is probably not the best method of blocking the search engines from crawling duplicate pages, as other sites may link to those pages. A better method may be to block pages you don't want crawled with a robots.txt file.

Notice that Google has made no distinction between internal or external links. It simply says that nofollow links won't raise a red flag.