How NOT to do link requests

I recently received a link request from a webmaster that was once again a great example of how people get things wrong. He had found one of my sites and thought it would be a “great fit” for his audience. The guy was, for all I know, legit as his name checked out when I googled it and the site he was mentioning in his email seemed genuine. However, why my site on World of Warcraft is a great fit for his Adsense templates site, I fail to see.

Now, I think contacting other webmaster for business proposals is totally OK, if done ethically and with your brain turned on. The way this guy was going about it, though, was out of bounds as far as I’m concerned.

First of all, he sent a second email a couple of days after the first. His thinking was probably along the lines of “maybe my first email was overlooked, I’ll just send a second one to be sure.” What this will usually do is send you to the spam folder, as many email programs’ spam rules think that two emails from the same unknown address is likely to be spam. In any other case you’re likely annoying the recipient, as he wasn’t interested in your email the first time around. But this guy went a step further, he sent a third email. Pretty ballsy, considering he’s sending this using his real name or at least a name he uses online, e.g. for submitting to article directories.

Secondly, this guy committed one of the capital sins of email: he entered all recipients in the cc: field, so everyone who received his email could see who else had received it. The last time I saw someone do this was circa 1998, but I guess stupidity survived the 2k switch unharmed.

But wait, there’s more. One of the links in his HTML email linked to an address different from what the link anchor text implied - not very reassuring. It was probably just an error on his part, but if I’m getting link exchange requests from people I don’t know, the email better check out in every respect.

To sum it up, this guy was requesting a link exchange for a site totally unrelated to mine, using email in a way that borders on spam, all while exposing email addresses of the people he was contacting. Not bad for a Tuesday afternoon.