I get several emails every day asking me to exchange links with people. If I accepted all the “offers” there would be thousands of links on my site now cluttering the place up.
Today I had one of the really scammy ones that annoy me, so felt it was time to blog it!
This is a slightly edited version of the email I just received. At first these offers seem pretty good, but they are not.
Hey there,
My name is Billy and I’m the webmaster for spammersltd.com we target the SEO market. Simply, my job is to find new solutions to provide our customers on our website. I just did a search on Google.com for “some random keywords that you may rank for” – Anyway, there you were, webologist.co.uk, and yes here I am too!
Well, I just thought that since we are both targeting pretty similar web visitors on our web sites.
Would you ever consider doing a link exchange with us?
I took the time to add your site on our Link Exchange page in which i will remove if I don’t hear from you, take a look: http://spammersltd.com/partner/webologist.co.uk
By the way I was not quite sure which email address you could be found (so I spammed about 100 different ones for your domain), I hope this gets to you.
Thanks,
Billy
So, at first you may think, what a nice chap Billy is. He has gone out of his way to contact me (sending mails to mail@, admin@, webmaster@, support@, info@, enquiries@, mum@, thedog@ and spam@) and created a nice page dedicated to my site with a screen shot, description and links! Wow!
Of course, this is a scam. Why?
- This is very likely to be automated, Billy is a computer, part of a program built to get links
- The page that “Billy” created does not actually link (in the SEO meaning of the word) to your site. It links to an internal page on his site, and redirects to yours. This internal page does not pass “pagerank”. There is a setting in the robots.txt that says to Google and other search engines, “do not go here, nothing to see, move along”. Meaning, it has zero benefit to your site.
- The page that they create is often an “orphaned page”, meaning that they do not link to the page from anywhere on their site. Sometimes there will be a very temporary link on the home page, but this will soon vanish. This means that the page with the link on will never carry any weight (SEO weight).
- All they want you to do is link to their site, usually from a “blogroll” or some other link that will be on your homepage, which will send maximum “link juice” back to their business.
So yes, they are linking to your site, but in a way that will not actually benefit you. Nobody will find their page either while looking at their site or through the search engines. You will never get any referrals and you will not receive any SEO benefit either. Therefore, it is an SEO Spam Scam. Just ignore theses mails.
