I received an unsolicited e-mail yesterday. It asked “can we exchanged (sic) links?” Then it provided the URL they wanted promoted. A hotmail return e-mail address was supplied. I checked the web site they wanted promoted. It had 451 inbound links to it. It also had a Google Page Rank 2. So I thought about this proposition and the value it would provide to me.The first thing that was sketchy was that they were spamming me. They did not address me by name. They also did not give me their name. Also they only had a hotmail account. That does not mean they are evil. However they do not have e-mail, or will not give out their e-mail from their own domain. And the final straw was that their email was not grammatically correct. So perhaps English is not their first language. Still that made the request seem a bit shady.
Google does not like link exchanges in general I think. So I would not want to do anything that would penalize me in terms of page rank. The page they wanted to exchange was only a page rank 2. It also linked out to a lot of other sites. So they would not be able to provide much extra link juice for my site.
I guess I could respond with a test URL of my own. Then I could tell them to link to me first, and I would reciprocate. That way I could ensure this was not a one way deal. I could also analyze the effect on my test web page. Hey. It might be worth a try. However I suspect this would either have negligible or even negative effects in the end. You can’t fault somebody for trying to gain inbound links. To sign me up you need to perfect your pitch.
