Link exchanges – never really a good idea

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Link exchanges – never really a good idea

Posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 9:13pm. #

In my mailbox today…

Hi
My name is Lucy Anderson. I’ve just visited your website mediauk.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in exchanging links with my website. I can offer you a home page link back from my Recruitment and Jobs website which is www (dot) cfs-fund (dot) com
As mentioned, your link would be placed on the site home page, not on any “links” pages which may be buried in the site somewhere. I’m sure this exchange would be benefitial for both of our sites, helping towards increasing our visibility in search engines.
(snip)

Hi, Lucy,

A link on www (dot) cfs-fund (cough) com sounds great. Collaboration is always a good idea.

Media UK has over half a million visits a month; while I can’t help noticing that your site is totally unlisted in Google.

Media UK contains thousands of pages of unique content. Your site appears to contain nothing but ten articles. The article I chose to research was copied from articledistribution.com without any attribution, which is in violation of their terms of use. And it’s really very badly written.

Media UK contains a privacy policy with information required by Google to take part in their AdSense program. Your website contains a privacy policy without such information, which violates Google’s AdSense program. Actually, your privacy policy is so boiler-plate you’ve even forgotten to remove the information at the top urging you to edit it.

Your copyright at the bottom of your website still retains a boiler-plate “yourcompany.com”, and is dated 2007. I’d wonder whether XSitePro are delighted at this use of their templates.

And your letter, Daniel, while it’s sweet that you’re using a girl’s name, it’s less sweet that even this is a simple copy’n'paste job – I bet you can spell “beneficial” correctly if you really try.

On second thoughts, Daniel, I’m not sure I will rush to collaborate.

Cheers, anyway.

Photo: a much better exchange idea, from Chrys on Flickr. Used under licence – thanks!

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8 comments

Andrew Booth said at April 16th, 2009 at 9:37pm

Haha. Thanks for posting this – gave me a chuckle.

Ian Delaney said at April 16th, 2009 at 9:52pm

I get a couple of these a week. Always a female name.

The twist I get with more modern iterations is that I get linked to by site A, for linking to site B.

Needless to say, site A has a lower page-rank than site B, and even so, link-exchanges are easily spotted by the big G.

Ultimately, while we all understand that being linked to is good for our juice, any shortcuts to that will be penalised. The cheaters are always on the defensive.

Beware the link exchange - the snake oil of online marketing | BitterWallet said at April 17th, 2009 at 9:02am

[...] reply (as posted on his personal blog) dispatches with the request in a thoroughly polite and decent way, while similtaneously taking it [...]

David Sloly said at April 17th, 2009 at 10:17am

Fantastic. I always delete these kind offers before I get past the second line. Maybe now I will be inspired to reply.

Riaz Kanani said at April 19th, 2009 at 1:45pm

LOL – wonder if you will egt any sort of reply

John said at April 20th, 2009 at 12:17pm

Hello,

And very funny reply you gave, It made me laugh for a couple of minutes.

Also we must mention that the link exchange between pages that have related information that also prove an useful addition are encouraged. But as exchanges just for visibility in search engines are wrong. Do only things that increase the user experience on your website, and the search engines will take care of the rest.

AriWriter said at May 20th, 2009 at 4:21pm

Emailing Me Internet Marketing Spam…

//
I’m accustomed to receiving email spam, but internet marketing pitches are a new breed because they arrive in my inbox, not my spam folder.
The good ones are personable and hard to tell…

atul chatterjee said at May 21st, 2009 at 8:28am

Someone has been trying to sell me medical pills for the past six months.
Another set of guys have been trying to give me $1 million or some such amount I have won in a lottery.
They are almost my friends now.

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Link exchanges – never really a good idea

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