What if link requests were honest?

Everybody who owns a website gets them, and usually several a week: link requests. Especially when your site jumps to a PageRank of 5 or higher, all kinds of webmasters suddenly seem to feel that their website is related to yours. And since they are, why not swap links, right?

Over the years, I must have received thousands of link requests emails, but I have sent out quite a few myself as well. This has learned me to understand the language of link requests, because some are actually written in a secret language with lots of hidden messages. I have translated an email for everybody who doesn’t speak this language, so you can see what *most* link builders actually mean.

This is a real life (slightly modified) example:

Hi Webmaster,

I have a web site, http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com and have spent a lot of time and effort to ensure my visitors gain the maximum benefit from their visit, and from what I have to offer. As our web sites are closely related and our products do not compete, I feel the exchanging of links would be a mutually beneficial arrangement. If you are interested for Link Exchange so please feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience. I will also add your site within 6 hours of your positive reply.

Here is my linking details :-

Title: Buy cheap blue widgets online
URL: http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com
Description: Cheap blue widgets, high quality red widgets, exclusive ivory widgets and fluffy pink widgets. Free worldwide shipping on orders over $250.

Or you can simply use the following Linking code:

<p><a href="http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com"> Buy cheap blue widgets online</a> Cheap blue widgets, high quality red widgets, exclusive ivory widgets and fluffy pink widgets. Free worldwide shipping on orders over $250.</p>

I will add your link at here :
http://www.website1.com/web-development-resources.html (pr1)
http://www.website2.org/website-development-services-india.html (pr3!)
http://www.web-site-4.com/Resources.html
http://subdomain.website3.com/Computers_Communications_And_Electronics/Internet/

Your link will be added on my site within 6 hours. So if you are interested for link exchange with my site please let me know and we can do a better work for our sites.

Please forward me your linking details along with confirmation where my link have been added by you.
Hoping an early and positive response from your side.

Have a nice day ahead :)

Bests Regards
webmaster.anna@gmail.com

But this is what ‘webmaster Anna’ actually means:

Hi there,

I was too lazy to find out what your name actually is, but webmaster is probably fine, right?

I have a web site, http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com and have spent a lot of time trying to find short cuts to make money with it. I am quite lazy and want to make loads of cash while I stay in my bed as long as possible. I believe that a link on your website to mine will improve my search engine rankings, so I feel the exchanging of links would be a good arrangement for me in particular. I love starting sentences with ‘I’ (after all, it is all about me), and my grammar is pretty bad. I pretend to add your site within 6 hours of your positive reply, so please drop all your other work and reply to me asap. Capice?

Here are my linking details :

Title: Buy cheap blue widgets online (Yes, this is my company name. Pinky swear.)
URL: http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com
Description: A bunch of keywords here. Additional sentence to camouflage all the keywords.

And since I really want you to use the exact keywords I provided as the anchor text, here is the info in html:

<p><a href="http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com"> Buy cheap blue widgets online</a> Buy cheap blue widgets online A bunch of keywords here. Additional sentence to camouflage all the keywords.</p>

I will add your link at here :
http://www.very-crappy-website.com/irrelevant-resources.html (PR1)
http://www.3-way-linking-site.org/link-page-391.php (PR3 – w00t!)
http://www.trapezoidal-linking-matriflux.com/Resources.html
http://even.more-crap.com/Free_Links_For_All/ (notice how I have stopped mentioning PR?)

Your link will be added on my site within 6 hours. My script will take care of it, and it will also take care of deleting two of your four links in about a week. The other two links will be on penalized pages with a noindex, nofollow meta tag. So if you are interested in exchanging links, please let me know and I will screw you over.

Please forward me your linking details, along with confirmation where my link has been added by you. I need to show this to my boss to collect my bonus.
Hoping for an early and positive response from your side. I’ll sign you up for 23 newsletters you won’t be able to unsubscribe from if you ignore all three of my messages.

Have a nice day ahead. With an average conversion rate of nearly .02%, I’m sure I will :)

Best regards,

webmaster.anna@gmail.com
(My name is actually Roger, but I think you’re more likely to accept my offer when I call myself Anna. Yes, I will literally do anything for links.)

Yes, the language of some link requests can be quite deceiving. Make sure you write yours in plain English.