Link Request Email How NOT To

I doubt the SEO world needs another post about link request emails, let alone get into the implications of mass link exchanges from homepages(or any page for that matter). I’m just winding down from a long day of building relationships for my clients the proper way, low and behold this email came into our inbox.

Hi,

My name is Abigail Cox, Web Marketing Consultant. Ive greatly enjoyed looking through your site linkbuildr.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in exchanging links with my website, which has a related subject. I can offer you a home page link back from my related websites all in google cache and backlinks which are:

cleanprotalk(dot)com PR4
americanmominbusiness(dot)com

If you are interested, please send me the following details of your site:

TITLE:
URL:

I’ll add your link as soon as possible, in the next 24 hours. As soon as it’s ready, I’ll send you a confirmation email along with the information (TITLE and URL) regarding my site to be placed at yours.

I hope you have a nice day and thank you for your time.

Kindest regards,

Web Marketing Consultant

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED EMAIL, IT’S ONLY A REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE. YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HAS NOT BEEN ADDED TO ANY LISTS, AND YOU WILL NOT BE CONTACTED AGAIN. IF YOU’D LIKE TO MAKE SURE WE DON’T CONTACT YOU AGAIN, PLEASE FILL IN THE FOLLOWING FORM: emailsnomore(dot)com ; PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES FOR CONTACTING YOU.

I didn’t bother to block out the name or email address mainly because I don’t care, and there’s nothing really to protect here. While the only positive thing I can get out of her tactics was coming across as a woman. I instantly thought of a sexy web marketer out there thinking my site was hot stuff. Sadly, when you look at the CleanProTalk website you’ll see about 100 links in the blogroll which blows my mind a little…I didn’t think they’d net that many link exchanges, but then again it could be all her own sites.

So for those companies out there who don’t have a marketing team, and if an email like this somehow tricks your webmaster, you should train him or her to sniff these out. The CleanProTalk site in question should have easily been spotted as pure junk not only from the 100+ blogroll links, but at a quick glance you can see from my totally 31337 Gimp skills the crap that’s right in front of your eyes;

– so we have default WordPress sub-heading still in place

– duplicate content stolen from article sites without even linking back

– the 100+ sidebar links

– they didn’t bother to change the default category name

– adsense which tracks back to all their other sites on the web

So what should a link builder do to obtain a link? Well, in my opinion, you should first build your business relationships online and not even bother to do any link exchanges in the first place. There are so many bloody emails like this going out thanks to software and cheap ass outsourcing that you barely have a chance to get your legit message through. We’re living in a digital, social web and there are powerful tools such as Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook at your disposal. It takes time to network with real people, but if you do it right it will pay off in the end. Stay away from lousy sites, blogrolls and link pages because you’re only going to suffer in the long run!