Psst, Wanna Swap a Link?

Ever get one of these spam emails? (Names and details removed to protect the spammy)

Think I responded to this email with a link? If you can assemble the words hell, chance and snowball into a sentence, you may have the answer.

My personal website receives a handful of these every month in various shapes and forms. Yet most conform to a list of major online marketing no-nos.

• They are all very obviously form letters with no true insight into my website
• I am addressed as ‘webmaster’ despite my name appearing prominently throughout the site – it’s my domain name for pity’s sake!
• The email makes no reference to any content or gives any other indication that a real person has ever visited the site.
• The website making the offer is in a completely different industry to mine, meaning any link exchange would be woefully irrelevant.
• The website makes erroneous claims about how reciprocal links benefit both websites in the search engines
• Often, all of the details are not filled in, so that nonsensical phrases such as “I visited your website, [insert name of website], yesterday,” appear.

Swapping links has been going on ever since webmasters worked out that links had an influence on the search engines. Yet, after a decade of search engine optimization improvements, the search engines are clever enough to weed out spammy exchanges and inappropriate links.

Exchanging links with a casino site or some equally inappropriate online neighbourhood can actually have a very detrimental affect on your website. Links to and from websites earmarked as ‘spammy’ or engaging in suspicious linking activity can incur site penalties that lower your appearance in the search engines and lose you customers.

These spammy link exchange emails are extremely common, meaning that enough people must fall for them to be worthwhile. But you should never swap links with a website you would not naturally choose, especially when they can’t even manage the courtesy of a personal email or any real interest in the success of your site. You can bet that the website making the offer has a crappy ‘resources’ page stuffed with hundreds of links, making them near worthless in passing on any benefit to other sites. But those sites that do happen to link back may well have far fewer links, meaning their link carries more weight and helps them rise higher.

Their site wins, your site loses – just as you would expect.

Less obviously spammy than Viagra or breast enhancements or ‘genuine’ university degrees, these emails are designed to appeal to the inexperienced webmaster. Send them to the junk mail folder where they belong and continue using professional link building services and organic techniques.

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