Link Requests – A waste of time or just a waste of my time?

Own a website? Expect link trading email offers – it is a given. A lot of time and energy is devoted to this simple task; I just wish that the efforts put forward for these types of email requests demonstrated some rationale thought and offered a value added solution. Unfortunately this is rarely the case as more often than not; the requests come in as a selfish deal skewed towards the requester.

I am the project manager for one of our sites http://www.wisehandpoker.com/. This is a content rich site that deals with poker and is rapidly gaining an authoritative nature due to all the content we provide to major sites, publications and organizations.

Take this request I received this morning as it is pretty common. (Example edited to remove references to where the email came from and to what site they were trying to promote.)

Currently we are carrying out a 3 – Way link exchange program.
This gives us
both a better footage in Google ranking. I’ll link to you from one of my site,
and then you link from your site to my another site.

If you are
interested in exchanging links with us, please upload the following information
on your website

It goes on to say…

Please notify me when you upload our link and mail me all your link
details.

Hoping for a successful deal

Now as far as requests go it isn’t too bad with the following exceptions.

• They expect me to place a link to their site and notify them on the location prior to informing me of the URL of where they will place my link.

I took a look at the site they want me to link to and it is just another one of those poker portal sites that offers nothing to the viewers except for a way for the viewers to help make the site owner some money through affiliate links. What would be the value to our readers?

Good only knows what kind of lame ass link directory they would be placing my link on?

If you are going to spend time looking for quality sites to link with don’t you think it would be a wise idea to offer the other site a high quality link in exchange? Barring that, don’t you think you should at least disclose where you were planning to place the reciprocating link?

What we have to keep in mind here is that when linking to another site that link is considered to be a recommendation to your readers to visit that other site. As such don’t you think that you should make sure that the site you are linking to is of a value?

I know that the strategy here is to get me to put a link to their site and then hope that I forget about it so that you get a nice 1 way link. This may work for some sites because the site owners don’t know any better but I mean come on… if the site you are trying to secure a link from is miles better than yours and it offers something of real value, should you be trying these bullshit tactics?

Come on people; practice a little linking responsibility in an effort to make the Internet a more useful place for everybody. Don’t pollute the web with your pitiful attempts to make money by promoting your garbage sites with third rate linking schemes. If you want to use a 3 way link system, offer the other site in your triumvirate something of value and fully disclose everything up front.

I can’t really say that the request I got this morning was totally useless as it did offer me the opportunity to blog about something today.