My Pissed Off Response To A Link Exchange Request
Posted on December 21, 2007
Filed Under Blogging advice
I got an email a few minutes ago asking for a link exchange with one of my sites. My site offers information about everything related to conferencing, has a PR 4 and is listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directory among others.
I usually delete suggestions like you’re about to read but this one really pissed me off and I even spent 2 minutes writing my response to hopefully help this guy get on the right track. (and to release my negative emotions 
)
Here’s his email:
—– Original Message —-
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 11:32:14 AM
Subject: Submission from “Contact” form
——————————
First Name: Jim
Last Name: John
E-mail Address: chirag.shah@(Ok, I won’t be so bad to really show his email although it’s tempting ) .com
Respected Sir,
I did a web search on interior design and your site was one of those listed. I think the content of our website is similar enough to yours that our visitors would benefit from us sharing links.
Therefore, I would like to make the proposal that we each put a link on our website to the others site. Hopefully, this will increase the traffic of both sites and provide interest to our readers.
If you are interested, send me the exact URL that you would like me to use and 200 word description.
I intend to add it to the links page at http://www.mywebspider.com .
Below is the information for my website:
URL: http://www.tatvasoft.com
Title: Outsourcing Software Development
Description: TatvaSoft is a global offshore software outsourcing company with offshore software development center in India. We provide offshore outsourcing services to clients in US & Europe. TatvaSoft provides range of outsourcing software development including custom application development, web development and integration services.
For your convenience, here is the HTML Code:
<a href=”http://www.tatvasoft.com” title=”Outsourcing Software Development”><b>Outsourcing Software Development</b></a><br>TatvaSoft is a global offshore software outsourcing company with offshore software development center in India. We provide offshore outsourcing services to clients in US & Europe. TatvaSoft provides range of <a href=”http://www.tatvasoft.com” style=”text-decoration:none;color:#000000″>Outsourcing Software Development</a> including custom application development, web development and integration services.
Waiting your reply,
Thanks & Regards
Jim
Tatvasoft
——————————
Here’s my reply:
For Gods sake Jim (not your real name, right?),
How do you expect to succeed in business and life if you plan to trick your potential future business partners?
Are there really so stupid people on the net to actually fall for your offers? (Like getting a worthless link from a general directory in exchange for a high quality theme relevant link?)
I usually don’t spend more than 2 seconds reading and deleting an email like yours but you really pissed me off.
Why you don’t set up some morally high New Year’s resolutions for 2008?
I hope you find the right way soon, otherwise your life and business will never succeed.
Tomaz Mencinger, webmaster
P.S. I also hate liars. How come your name is Jim John and your email is chirag.shah@……com?
——————–
My guess is that this guy never read Link Exchange Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make.
- Related posts:
Comments
14 Responses to “My Pissed Off Response To A Link Exchange Request”
Leave a Reply
Please, if he answers back post his reply here. I’d love to laugh some more.
P.S. If his reply will also be annoying please, please put his mail so we can make fun of him
Why am I smiling after reading this piece of blogging advice? I also like that releasing negative emotions tip. I could not help but go to the website in question just “to see.” If you click on the suggest a URL button, they give you a message stating that “This section is temporary down.Please visit after few weeks.” Unmitigated gall!
Actually I found the most of the email quite good besides the obvious lies. If he had used his real name, a similar themed website of a fair quality I would actually have considered it.
But I totally agree that when people lie to you they don’t deserve anything from you. Not even a response.
Well he succeeded in getting a link to your blog.
A link is a link.
AlexK, I think the link doesn’t count if it’s not “live”. (I mean clickable.)
Maybe some SEO expert can confirm that…
OK Tomaz…what are you really trying to say?
Unfortunately I get about 200 of these a day if not more…… I read on someones blog somewhere that someone had set up a website that posted all these spam mails and used them to generate content then monetized it…..hahaha…… how funny is that….
Have a good one….. eric aka NoviceSEO
Indeed the link doesn’t count as a vote to the search engines (nor for the purposes of passing that old dinosaur, Pagerank) unless it is live. Of course it can still send traffic to the site from people such as myself cutting-and-pasting it into the browser so we can have laugh at these clueless jokers. Trouble is, if they send enough of these out there will always be someone inexperienced enough to take them up on the offer.
That is correct Tomaz.
Spider bots require the ‘a’ tags to recognize a link – otherwise it’s just a keyword on your site.
But that is pretty crazy…
You get a link from a poor directory, and he gets a high-qulity relevant link…
that’s just not right…
NoviceSEO – good idea! Maybe I’ll even start up a free blogger blog and post them there with some Adsense, lol.
By the way, he claims he found my site for the interior design search, and I don’t even have a single keyword “interior design” on my site.
http://www.google.com/search?q=chirag.shah&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7HPID
Woops?
Although it appears he DOES actually have some site related to interior design..
Hmm, maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I DON’T have any keywords “interior design” on my website but he claims he found my site through that search.
So that’s baloney too.
Interior design? Maybe he forgot to read Step #3 in your blog post “Make Your Site Known – Link Building Strategies And Tips (Step 7)”.
DR
Just classic, there even more annoying when they spam your contact forms applying for jobs or outsourcing.
I’ve recently received the same letter and I share your feelings. Though I did not bother to write back to him. I wrote a letter to his employers, asking how an “India’s leading IT company” got so low. I also did a quick check in Google and it seems he’s not a “Jim”. It’s his real name and he’s a noob SEO from Ahmedabad, working for Tatvasoft.