Marketing Tom Media is an Internet Marketing company based in Cardiff, Wales. We offer training, consultancy and development to businesses, public sector organisations and educational establishments. This site offers details on my range of Consulting Services and eMarketing Workshops. It also features a blog

« Web 2.0 Explained | Main | Happy St David's Day! »

Reciprocal Link Spam

Practically every day I get emails from people asking for reciprocal links. They invariably start off with:

I recently found your site http://www.marketingtom.com and am very interested in exchanging links. I've gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page:

At which point I check and find that I am listed at the bottom of a long list of other websites. These emails always finish off with the folloiwng paragraph:

As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a link to my site as follows:

One thing that rankles me is that every time I use my Google Toolbar cached tool I find that these sites have not even been listed on Google. So, we have a situation where:

  1. They want me to put a link to them from one of my web pages which has a Google PR rank of 6 or even 7.
  2. The value I get from a link, even if it has a good PR ranking is minimal as there are so many other links on that page.
  3. What the hell doesHome Insurance, a Czech hotel or Work at Home Ideas have to do with Internet Marketing and Blogging.

In this instance reciprocal linking only benefits the site that asks me to create a link to them.

What to do?
I just tend to add them to my Yahoo! email spam list (they are almost always bulk spammers).

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2892/4361712

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Reciprocal Link Spam:

Comments

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the author has approved them.

This weblog only allows comments from registered users. To comment, please Sign In.