Search engines see an incoming link to your website as a “vote”. More links mean being a more reliable source and hence, better rankings. Links from trusted websites (read: high PageRank) and that are related to your niche are more valuable - that’s why link exchanges are important in any SEO compaign.

However, link exchange requests are usually futile because why would a trusted website link to a new one, i.e. yours? Besides, most webmasters believe that the search engines are able to detect “unnatural” links and will discount such reciprocal linking. So with everything going against you, shouldn’t people at least be honest when requesting for a link exchange?

Sorry for taking so long to build my case but that’s exactly what this post (or rant) is all about. :)

I’ve been receiving the following email over the last month:

——————————————————————————————–
Dear Webmaster,

My name is <sender’s name> and I have just gone through your site, and visited many pages. I have noticed that you have good content on the site. It would be better if we link to each other as reciprocal link place an important role in a search engine ranking algorithm.

I have already placed a link to your site on the following webpage:-

<reciprocal link location>

Your link details are here:-

<my link details>

Kindly link back to our site with the following details:

<where and how I’m supposed to link back>

We have adopted this strategy to create one-way link for your and our website. One-way links as I reckon helps boosts search engine rankings better than reciprocal links.

Please let me know whether or not you are interested.

If you wish to have your details changed, we would be interested in modification as per your requirements.

Please note that the link to your site will be active for 10 business days, if thereafter we do not detect a link to our site from your webpage, it will be assumed that you are not interested in reciprocal link and to be fair to our other link partners, we shall remove your link.

Thanks
<sender’s name>
<sender’s email address>
——————————————————————————————–

Nothing wrong there and the email looks quite professional. The only problem is the same email was sent from different senders and for link exchanges with different websites. And most of the time, I’m supposed to link my PR5 website in return for a PR0 link - ???

If that’s not insulting enough, ALL the senders had nice English names and some were using public Hotmail accounts. A quick check revealed that the email was sent from an Indian SEO company called eBrandz and being an Asian myself, I’m quite certain that not many Indians have names like Fossil, Adam or Matthew.

For a company that claims to have local presence in India, US, Singapore and the Middle East, this really puts them in a bad light dontcha think?