Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses

Every site owner receives emails requesting link exchanges and the more prominent your site in the search engines, the more requests you will receive. A few site owners and SEOs (on behalf of their clients), will automatically spam filter out the vast majority of these requests and consign them to the waste bin. For example any email whose subject is ‘Link Exchange Request’ can safely be deleted un-read.

Yesterday a client asked me, if I wasn’t reading the emails how we could be sure that we weren’t missing out on a useful link. I explained about automated link exchange requests and the erroneous meme that link quantity is more important than link quality. She wasn’t convinced however, so I proposed an experiment. She could select any of the link exchange requests that had fallen into the spam trap and if it was in the slightest way useful I would refund all last years invoices, an offer she couldn’t refuse!

This client is well placed in the search engines and currently 3 out of 120,000,000 for the primary keyword. So there were a lot of link exchange requests for her to choose from but this was the one she selected (immediately identifying text deleted):

From: “Janifer” <deleted@gmail.com>
To: <deleted>
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 7:52 PM
Subject: Link Exchange Request

Dear Webmaster,

I handle online marketing for my client http://www.deleted. As an ongoing process to increase the link popularity of my site , I am looking for some good quality sites to exchange links with my client’s site. I recently came across your site through search and found it beneficial and informative for our site’s visitors. I would like to offer you a link exchange with my site.

Here is the details of my site….

URL: http://www.deleted
Link Text: Storage Boxes
Description: Buying boxes just got easy! We are the online box shop. You can buy removal boxes, storage boxes, cardboard boxes, packing boxes, packing cartons, bubble wrap & more for delivery straight to your door!

You can also use following html code..

<P align=”left”><font size=”2″ face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”><a href=”http://www.deleted”>Storage Boxes</a> - Buying boxes just got easy! We are the online box shop. You can buy removal boxes, storage boxes, cardboard boxes, packing boxes, packing cartons, bubble wrap & more for delivery straight to your door!</font>

Your link will be added at : http://www.deleted

We hope that our content can serve as a valuable resource to your site visitors and we look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Regards,

Jenifer

Executive-Web Resources

http://www.deleted

Disclaimer: This is a one-time email request and we will write back to you only upon receipt of your reply. We strictly adhere to United States Federal Laws of Anti-spamming - CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

This is what I said to my client. The first thing to notice is that the email is from a Gmail account rather than the requesting domain and that we cannot identify who actually sent the request. Also “Here is the details of my site…” is poor English. Let’s have a look at the site they want us to link to:

Mmm…Looks at first glance to be a poorly constructed affiliate site. Let’s have a look at those links in the source.

We see many affiliate links like this one (immediately identifying text deleted):

<a href=”http://scripts.deleted/AFClick.asp?affiliateID=deleted&merchantID=deleted&programmeID=3434&mediaID=0&tracking=MOVINGKITS&url=http://www.deleted/show_products.asp?cat1=Moving+Kits”>
<img src=”images/moving_kits.gif” border=”0″ width=”156″ height=”24″></a>

OK let’s take a look at where they want to place a link to us:

Mmm…Looks like a poor quality directory page, links to everything from ‘Patio Furniture Covers’, through ‘Decal Junky Stick ‘Em Up!’ to ‘The Ultimate Stock Pick’. Let’s look at the domain in Whois and see who it belongs to. In the Whois we see a company domain in the ‘Registrant Email’ and bring up the site:

Well, what a surprise it’s an SEO company! So there we are, the link exchange request was from an SEO company who without telling us who they were and using automated software asked us to link to one of their clients with a poor quality affiliate site. In exchange they offered us a worthless link in a poor quality directory.

It has taken less than a minute and I looked at my client who had been following along without saying a word. “Like to look at another junked email link request” I said. There was a pause, then she replied “No thanks, let’s go and have lunch and I’ll pay.”

The moral of this story is, only good things happen if you never look at a link exchange request.