Watch Out for Link Exchange Emails

It seems as though there is a new game in town for January 2011, and it is designed to catch people unaware, who use Wordpress Powered Content Management System style websites. It's the old "rope a dope email link exchange game." Putting it mildly, it can kill your website SEO.

We wanted to talk about some of the characteristics of the link exchange requests. The first thing to look for is a URL with something cheesy like "partners" or "friends" or "roundtable" in the naming convention. The keywords "search engine ranking" are also often used. For example, your title might say "Dramatically improve your search engine ranking." Many of these emails will be sent to you multiple times, but the people will offer an apology for doing so, hoping you will go ahead and read the email. Here is an example of just such an email sent to a google account:



Nice bit of false empathy there. ;)

The technical trickery mentioned above is that if you visit the link they put in the email the linking post will appear *all over* the site that is "linking" to you. But if you open up a new browser from a different IP address and try to visit the parent category page before visiting the individual post page you will see that the post is only visible to a person who knows exactly where it is. So the people are not only mass automated email spammers, but they lie at hello as well (by deceiving folks into thinking there is an on-the-level exchange of some sort, while screwing them over with a page that is invisible to everyone but them).

If you genuinely want to work on a campaign of link exchanges, which still have value. You are going to need an SEO Expert to help you get that done. SEO Professional Services can give you quality links, that are developed over time with reputable firms. Remember, there is no such thing as a quick, free lunch.

Til nextime,

Johnny Smoes

SEO Experts Australia