Along the same lines as my earlier post titled “How NOT To Find An Internet Marketing Company“, the following email is a very common one full of common mistakes, but definitely worth pointing out here for those that aren’t yet sure how to construct an effective email link request.

I also get a kick out of posting some of the lame emails that I receive on a daily basis, and calling out the sender for spamming me. 🙂

Subject Line: Link Exchange Request

Hello,
I have found your website xxxx.com by searching Yahoo for “xxxxx xxxxx”. I think our websites has a similar theme, so I have already added your link to my website.

Your link: http://www.xxxx.com
Your link title: The title info from the page

You can view the page where your link was added, approve and modify your listing anytime by clicking link below: http://www.webpark.ru/go.php?url=http://www.goldpromotion.com/approve.php?key=xxxx

If you will not approve your listing in 10 days, link will be automatically removed.

Why it is important to exchange links?
– more links will increase your website popularity
– more links will increase your P@geRank
– The more links you have – the more your website is important to search engines
– The more your website is important to search engines – the more visitors you get
– More visitors increase your sales and website popularity

Why it is important to exchange links with us?
– Our website has similar theme like yours
– Our website gets more than 1000 visitors every day (your website may receive some free visitors from our website too)
– Our website has quality content
– Our website is hosted on dedicated IP
– Our website has a lot incoming links from other similar themed domains

I wish you the best with your website and believe this link exchange can be useful for our websites by seeking better search engine ranking. If you have any questions, do not hesitate, contact me.

Jeff P.
webmaster@goldpromotion.com

Let me quickly run through the many reasons that this is a bad attempt at building links to a site:

1. This site has very little/no traffic, so will not increase my “website popularity”
2. This site has no Pagerank to offer, and mentioning P@gerank is a definite no-no as well
3. Wrong again, the more quality, relevant links built over time your site has is what makes your website more important to search engines
4. This site is not similarly themed to the one he contacted me about
5. There’s no way this site receives “more than 1000 visitors every day”
6. It definitely doesn’t contain quality content as stated
7. The site “has a lot of incoming links from other similarly themed domains”? I found ~20 unrelated sites linking to it

If you’re going to make claims regarding the advertising potential of your site, at least make sure they’re all true. Savvy site owners will check; we spend a lot of time building links and we know what to look for, tools to use, etc.

And lastly, here’s the most important reason why this email is completely ineffective: any internet marketer worth their salt knows that reciprocal linking is dead, especially via mass email blasts with random sites like this one. The days of shortcuts are over. Today, you must be extremely creative to attract natural links and dedicated to finding links on sites related to yours where no one else or very few are currently advertising.

Further Reading:
Increase Your Link Request Conversion – Don’t Do This!