Someone has just emailed you telling you that they have added a link to your website from theirs; now they want you to link back. Should you link back? Generally, no.
If you own a website that has a published email address on the site you have probably received an email similar to the following:
Dear Webmaster,
We are marketing www.someotherwebiste.com and we feel that reciprocating it with your site should help increase traffic and also search engine rankings to a certain extent. We have placed a link to your website over here: http://www.someotherwebsite.com/related/somepagetheychoose.html. Your link details are: http://www.yourwebsite.com / Name of Your Website /A blurb they make up for you.
Kindly check the link details and if you need any modifications, please let me know. I would also appreciate if you link back to my website using this code (and then they provide a link and a blurb of their own.) I will keep the link active for 7 days. If you are not interested in linking back then we will remove this reciprocal link (to be fair to our other link partners).
*NOTE: We have been manually researching links and contacting those who are interested in Link exchange. If we have offended you by sending this to you by mistake, we apologize. If we do not get any positive response, we shall not send a mail to you again.
Why Link Demands Are Bad For Your Website
Let's take a look at this gimmick. First, the majority of knowledgeable webmasters and legitimate link developers typically do contact website owners asking for a link because they knows better than to ask for a reciprocal link. Google specifically states that link swapping on any kind of large scale to artificially boost your website is bad for all websites involved and if caught, your site will be penalized or even blacklisted.
Google webmasters guidelines specifically state not to engage in certain link building practices including:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
Second, any link someone else sets up for you is a dead giveaway the person contacting you is trying to force unnatural links and is very likely a bad site for you to link back to. Another give away that this is a link building scheme (and not a legitimate request) is that your link will be deleted in 7 days unless you link back. Clearly, this website owner is not trying to build quality, related links - they are trying to extort other site owners into linking back to them.
Last, check out the note in the the footer disclaimer. The email address this was sent to was a spam catchall, and was sent to an address not associated with one of my websites. This means the email address was most likely harvested by a spam robot rather than my site being handpicked for its worthiness. This footer is an attempt to hide that the site owner was breaking CAN SPAM Act laws.
Should You Honor Legitimate Link Requests?
Why not? Many site owners overlook the value of linking outside their own sites. But be sure you visit the website requesting a link from you before you add on. Do not click on links in the email itself as they could have a virus. Manually enter the URL of the site in a browser.
Check the website for content, page rank, their own inbound links and if it seems like a "trusted and valued" site it is probably safe to link to them. If the webmaster offers a reciprocal link consider if the link back will add any value to your website and be sure not to link page to page (i.e., you link to Site A on your page X. Site A should never directly link back to your page A.)
Best Practices For Link Development
The two "best practices" for link building remain:
- Have great content and information or features worth linking to and people will organically link to your website (the best kind of links you can get); and
- Do add outbound links to quality, related websites. If all your links are internal, search engines will consider you too self-contained to be all-important in general searches.
